Chapter XVIII…

Chapter XVIII

A gray foggy morning succeeded to the cold windy night. It was six o'clock when the Elizabeth left the wharf, and I had been busy with the fires since three. I soon fell into the work, and scarcely needed the instructions of the lumpish, growling engineer. I had to laugh once or twice involuntarily when the man, seeing me attend to this or the other matter about the engine without directions, stared at me with a look half of surprise and half of vexation. I had told him that I was an entire novice at this work, and this was the literal truth; but I had not told him, nor was there any necessity that I should, that I had thoroughly studied marine steam-engines with the best of teachers, and had familiarized myself with even the minutest parts on an excellent model. And if in a few hours I had mastered the work of a regular fireman, in even a less time I had acquired the appearance of one. To save my own clothes I had laid them in part aside, and put on a working blouse of my unlucky predecessor, which fitted me perfectly; and what with handling the coal and the effects of a stream of smoke which drove into my face for quite ten minutes from the refractory furnace while I was making up the fires, even my friend Doctor Snellius, who piqued himself so greatly upon his physiognomical memory, would not have recognized me. But I cared little for this, for happily I had other things to occupy my attention.

I say happily, for it was ill with me in both head and heart. The death of my father, who had died without my being able even once to press his stern honorable hand, the meeting with my sister who put her children out of my way as if they were endangered by my presence, the prospect of the future which looked all the darker the more I thought over it--all this would have completely overwhelmed me had not the honest furnace been there in which the coals glowed so splendidly and the flames danced so merrily, while the sturdy engine worked on manfully and unresting. Only free work can make us free, my teacher had said to me. I had believed him at his word, but to-day for the first time I comprehended it, as I felt how the hard work which I had here to perform lightened more and more the load upon my heart, and the clouds passed away from my brow.

A kind of joyful pride took hold of me as I felt myself at home here; and I thought of that day eight years' before when I took that fateful trip on the Penguin and visited my friend Klaus in the engine-room, and to my wine-heated brain the engine appeared a machine only fit to crush the life out of me. The good Klaus! He had trouble enough with me that day, and care enough about me; and I should give him both trouble and care now if I should go to him to learn with his help to be a good workman. Some care I should give him, not much; I had found out this morning that I could stand more firmly on my own feet than I had supposed.

Far more firmly than my present superior, the bearded engineer, stood upon his. He stood by no means firmly, the honest fellow, and his watery eyes as well as the sleepy expression of his far from handsome face, and the vulgar perfume of alcohol which he diffused about him, made it obvious that his unsteady gait was not altogether due to the rolling of the boat. The worthy man was not exactly drunk--a regular engineer is never drunk, even though he sits up to two or three in the morning in a tavern drinking Swedish punch with his colleagues from the Swedish mailboat--but neither was he sober; so far from it that I on my side began to look at my superior with suspicious looks when, standing by his lever, he sank into deep meditation, which often bore a striking resemblance to a peaceful slumber.

"A warming-plate wanted on the forward deck; quick, Herr Weiergang!" called the steward down to the engine-room. Herr Weiergang nodded at me: it was a matter that concerned me especially. I knew what was wanted. I had been often enough on steamboats in rough weather when the motion of the boat rendered it impossible for those ladies who readily suffered from sea-sickness to remain in the cabin, and the sharp north-east wind and the spray made the exposure upon deck disagreeable and sometimes intolerable. Intolerable, if the honest fireman were not at hand with plates of iron cast especially for this purpose, which he has heated on the boiler and obligingly places under their half-frozen feet.

To-day I was the honest fireman. It struck me rather oddly; in all my life I had never done this service; had never dreamed that I should ever have to perform it. Had I to do it then? Certainly: I had undertaken the duty of the injured man, and this was part of his duty. So in five minutes I was on deck, holding a well-heated iron in my hands, which I had protected by a bunch of oakum.

It was now about noon, and the first time I had been on deck. The atmosphere was gray and dense with mist; one could scarcely see a hundred paces ahead. The wind was contrary, so that, though it was not violent, the boat pitched heavily, and a cold fine spray from the waves that broke against the bow swept continually over the deck.

The deck was nearly deserted, or at least seemed so, as the ten or twenty passengers were crouching in every corner, behind the paddle-boxes, the deck-cabin, and wherever any projection offered a little shelter.

"Here, my friend, here!" cried a voice that had a familiar sound to me, and turning suddenly around, I gave so violent a start that I had nearly dropped the plate. There stood a man, who, though he had now a gray old-fashioned overcoat with wide sleeves over his blue frock-coat with gold buttons, and wore his cap not pushed back from his forehead, as usual, but pulled down over his eyes--could be no other than my old friend Commerzienrath Streber.

"Here, my friend!" he cried again, and pointed with his right hand, while with his left he held fast to the capstan, to a lady crouching with her back towards me upon a low chair behind a great coil of cable at the bow of the vessel. The lady drew a large plaid cloak, lined with some soft and fine material, close around her slender figure, and turned her face, which was framed in a swan's-down hood, towards me.

It was a sweet lovely girlish face, upon whose cheeks the sea-breeze had kissed the delicate pink to a bright glow, and whose deep-blue brilliant eyes contrasted singularly with the gray water and the gray air. It had been seven years since I saw this face last. The child had become a maiden; but the maiden had still the face, or at least the mouth and eyes of the child, and by this mouth and these eyes I knew her. I started involuntarily and had to grasp the plate firmly to save it from falling on the wet deck, while I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. It was certainly a severe trial to appear before the maiden who had been my little friend in other days, in such a costume, and with a face embrowned with soot.

But this dress and this sooty covering were what saved me; she looked up at me with a little surprise but without recognizing me.

"Lay it here, my friend," she said, leaning back a little in her chair, and raising the edge of her skirt a little, so that I had a glimpse of the daintiest little feet in the world, resting on their heels to keep them from the wet deck.

I kneeled, and did what was required, no more and no less; perhaps rather less than more, for she said:

"You can bring me another by and by, if you have time; you do not seem to have time just now."

"Yes; and bring one for me at once!" cried the commerzienrath.

"And for me, if I may venture to ask," cried a thin voice from a corner between the deck-house and the mast, where out of some half-dozen shawls and wrappings peeped out a red nose, and in the wind fluttered a yellow curl which could belong to no one but Fräulein Amalie Duff.

"And for me!" "And for me!" cried a half-dozen other voices from as many other piles of mufflings, whose owners, with the promptness of desperation, had comprehended the advantage of a hot iron plate on a wet deck.

"But for me first!" screamed the commerzienrath, getting alarmed at the competition. "You know who I am, don't you?"

I did not deem it necessary to assure the Herr Commerzienrath that I knew him more than well enough, and hastened away from the deck, which was getting hotter to me than my furnace. I went below in a very unenviable frame of mind, and the thought that presently I must go on deck again brought great beads of perspiration to my forehead; but when I thought the matter over I found that my agitation was merely occasioned by very ordinary vanity. I hated to appear before the pretty girl as a sooty monster--this it was and nothing more; and while I was thus thinking as I stood by the boiler, the plates upon it had long reached the needful temperature, and the steward had called down three times to know if I was not ready with those confounded irons.

"Be ashamed of yourself!" I said to myself; "the poor things up there are freezing because you happen to have on a ragged blouse, and a patch or two of soot on your face. Shame upon you!"

And I was ashamed of myself, and went up the ladder and boldly marched direct to the place where the poor half-frozen governess was crouching in her wet wrappings.

Raising her water-blue eyes to me with the expression of helpless misery, she said, while her teeth chattered with cold, "You good man, you are my preserver!"

"Why do you not stay in the cabin?" I asked. I had no need to speak in Platt-Deutsch, or to disguise my voice, which either the sharp north-easter, or my embarrassment, or both together, made unnaturally deep and rough.

"I should die down there!" moaned the poor creature.

"Then sit over there by the paddle-box, where you have some shelter. You have here the worst place on the whole deck."

"O you good man!" said the governess. "It is indeed an eternal truth that there are good men in every clime."

I had to bite my lips.

"Can I assist you?" I said. "If you do not mind my working-dress----"

"'Among monsters the only feeling breast,'" murmured the governess, hanging on my arm.

"Where are you going, dear Duff?" cried a joyous voice behind us, and Hermine, who had sprung from her seat, came running up, apparently to help her friend, but if this was her intention, she could not carry it out for laughing. She clapped her hands and laughed until her white teeth glittered between her red lips. "Pluto and Proserpine!" she cried. "Düffchen, Düffchen, I always said they would carry you off from me some day!"

And she danced about the wet deck in wild glee, just as she had danced with her little spaniel about the deck of the Penguin eight years before.

"Are you ever coming to me, you fellow?" cried the commerzienrath, who, squeezed into a corner, had watched my attentions to the governess with very ill-pleased looks.

"There are two ladies here yet," I said.

"But I called you first," he cried, stamping with impatience.

"Ladies must always be served first, Herr Commerzienrath," smilingly remarked the captain, who was coming aft from the forward deck.

"O, you can talk: you are used to this abominable cold," growled the commerzienrath.

I went below again, but not to stay long. The cry for warm plates had grown general, and a hard job I had of it to satisfy the impatient clamors from all quarters. The weather had in the mean time grown rougher, and the fog increased in density. I observed that the captain's jovial face grew graver and graver, and once I heard him say to a passenger who had the appearance of a seafaring man:

"If we were only well out of the cursed channel once. With this wind the largest ships can come in; and we can not see a hundred paces ahead."

I knew enough of seamanship fully to comprehend the captain's uneasiness; and I had another anxiety of my own besides.

My superior, namely, the engineer Weiergang, had visibly with every hour sunk deeper and deeper into meditation upon the felicities attending the copious indulgence in Swedish punch; and though he still mechanically stood at his post and performed his duties about the engine, where now, as the vessel was going steadily ahead, there was but little to do, I still did not leave the engine-room without considerable uneasiness. How easily might it happen that the narrowness of the channel should render a complicated man[oe]uvre necessary, and was the nodding figure there in a condition to carry it out?

I had gone on deck with another plate, intended for no other than the blue-eyed, vivacious beauty. She had resumed her old place at the bow, and gave me a friendly nod as I approached.

"I give you a great deal of trouble," she said.

"No trouble at all," I answered, with a bow.

"Are you from Uselin?" she asked, while I arranged the plate.

"No," I muttered, about to take a hasty departure.

"But you speak our Platt." she said quickly, and looked sharply at me with a surprised expression.

I felt that the coating of soot on my cheeks must be very thick indeed to hide the flush which I felt burning in my cheeks.

"Ship in sight!" suddenly shouted the man at the foretop.

An immense dark mass loomed out of the gray fog. A feeling of terror, not for myself, seized me. I, too, shouted with my whole strength, "Ship in sight!" and following an impulse which flashed upon me like lightning, I bounded across the deck to the hatch leading to the engine-room, while the captain upon the paddle-box was shouting through his trumpet like mad--"Stop her! Back her!" an order which evidently was not obeyed, for the boat rushed through the water with undiminished speed.

How I got down the steep ladder I do not know. I only know that I flung the drunken engineer out of the way, pushed the lever to the other side, and simultaneously threw open the throttle-valve and let on the full head of steam.

A mighty shock followed, making the whole boat quiver as it struggled in the waves, produced by the reversed wheels. The push I had given him, and, perhaps still more the violent jar of the boat, had awakened the drunken engineer. In his confusion he rushed upon me like a madman to force me from my post, so that I defended myself against him with difficulty.

It was a terrible moment. Every instant I expected to feel the crash of the collision.

But a minute passed, and with it passed the danger, for I knew that by this time the collision must have taken place, if we had not escaped it: and now resounded through the speaking-trumpet the order, "Stop her!"

I placed the lever in the middle and closed the throttle-valve. My prompt execution of an order which he had plainly heard brought the engineer at once to his senses. Now for the first time he seemed to understand what I had kept shouting to him while we were struggling together; a deathly pallor overspread his bearded face, as some one came rapidly down the ladder.

"Don't ruin me," he murmured.

It was the captain, who wanted to see what upon earth was the matter below. Upon his good-natured honest face was still the trace of terror at the peril we had just escaped.

"What is the meaning of this, Weiergang?" he cried to the engineer.

"I was--I had--" he stammered.

"Seeing to the fire," I put in.

"And so--" he began again--

"We will look into this another time," said the captain, looking fixedly at the unfortunate man.

The captain knew his man. He saw that the man, whatever might have been his previous condition, was now thoroughly sober and fit for duty.

"We will look into it later," he repeated, and then turning to me, said:

"Come on deck with me."

I followed the captain, but not without first casting a glance at the engineer, whose meditations upon the effects of Swedish punch were now at an end, and who, in desperation at the frightful results of his indulgence, cast a supplicating look at me.

"What was the matter?" the captain asked me.

I held it my duty to tell him the whole truth, accompanying it with an entreaty that the man might be forgiven.

"He has always been the soberest fellow in the world," said the captain. "This is the first time he has ever behaved so."

"Then I trust it is the last time," I replied.

"I cannot comprehend it," said the captain. He spoke with me as if I was his equal.

"You have done me a great service," he continued. "Who are you? It seems to me I must have seen you before; and the ladies on deck have the same fancy."

"Never mind about that, captain," I said.

This brief dialogue took place while we were going up the ladder. The captain could not any further indulge the curiosity that had visibly seized him; he had too much to do.

My first glance, as I reached the deck, was involuntarily directed towards the ship which had so nearly been our destruction, and which now was disappearing in the fog astern of us; my next sought Hermine, who, with her maid, was busy recovering the governess, who had fainted. A sense of satisfaction, almost exultation, filled my breast. Thus might a general feel who has won a battle that he might have lost without disgrace.

The poor governess was not the only victim of the terror with which the frightfully imminent peril had filled the passengers of the Elizabeth. Here and there sat a lady with a face as white as that of a corpse; even the men looked pale and agitated, and were just beginning to talk over the occurrence. And, in fact, the situation must have been in the highest degree alarming. The approaching ship--a merchantman of the largest size--had been so negligently steered that the Elizabeth, though her engines were reversed and the full head of steam turned on, only escaped the collision by a few feet. Then the shock that shook the boat, the cracking and creaking of the planks, the crash of some half-dozen of the paddles that snapped at once--one did not need Fräulein Amalie Duff's susceptibility of nerves to be overwhelmed at such a moment.

Even now the state of things was not agreeable. The large steamer rolled in the heavy sea all the more violently now the engine had been stopped, on account of the injury to the wheels. Happily the wind was favorable, and sail was quickly made, so that we were able to control her with the helm. All the spare hands were busy repairing the paddles as far as possible, and I had learned enough of the carpenter's craft to lend a hand at once. I was not sorry in this way to avoid the inquisitive eyes of Hermine, and of Fräulein Duff, who possessed the talent of recovering from a swoon as promptly as she had fallen into it, and was now engaged in a conversation with her pupil and friend, which it could scarcely be doubted had some reference to me.

"Look as much as you please," I said to myself "I am, in spite of all, no worse than many another upon whom you have cast or will cast your beautiful eyes."

And yet I was glad, as she seemed about to come over to the place where I was standing, that I could creep into the open paddle-box, where things looked queer enough. As there was a heavy sea running we were obliged to confine our repairs to the merest make-shift.

In an hour the work was done, and we were ordered to the forward deck, where the bowsprit of the passing ship had carried away a part of the bulwarks.

I congratulated myself, when I crept out of the paddle-box, that the deck was nearly deserted, and especially that Hermine was nowhere to be seen; but as I passed the forecastle she suddenly appeared before me with her governess. The meeting was not accidental, for the duenna at once stepped back, but the young lady remained standing, and, looking up with her great blue eyes into mine, asked boldly:

"Are you George Hartwig, or are you not?"

"I am," I replied.

"How came you here? What are you doing here? Are you a sailor, or fireman, or what? And why? Can you do nothing better? Is this a fit place for you?"

These questions followed each other so rapidly that I contented myself with answering the last.

"Why not? It is no disgrace to be a fireman."

"But you look so--so black--so sooty--so frightful. I cannot bear such black men. You used to look much, very much better."

I did not know what to answer to this, so I merely shrugged my shoulders.

"You must come away from here!" said the young beauty, vivaciously. "This is no place for you."

"And yet it was very well that I was here to-day," I said with a touch of pride, of which I felt ashamed as soon as I had said it.

"I know it," she answered. "The captain told us. It is like you; but for that very reason you should not stay here. You are destined to something better than this."

"I thank you, Fräulein Hermine, for your kind interest," I answered gravely; "but what I am destined to, the result must show. In the mean time I must pursue my way, wherever it leads me."

She looked at me partly in displeasure, and partly, as it seemed to me, with compassion, and added quickly:

"You are poor: perhaps that is the reason you are here and look so--so--not nice. My father must help you: he is very rich."

"I know it, my dear young lady," I replied: "but just for that reason I do not desire his help."

A bright glow suffused her cheeks; her blue eyes flashed, and her red lips quivered.

"Then I will detain you no further."

She turned quickly from me and hastened away.

I was still standing in the same place, when Fräulein Duff came suddenly from behind the corner of the forecastle, where she had been an attentive if an invisible witness of our interview. Her watery eyes, in which sympathetic tears were now standing, were raised to mine, and she whispered in her softest tones, "Seek faithfully, and you will find!" Then prudently avoiding a reply on my part, she hurried after her young lady.

An hour later we touched at the wharf of St. ----.

I was below in the engine-room, where there was now enough to do, to my great satisfaction. I heard the noises upon deck, as the passengers hastened to leave the ship on board which they had passed so unpleasant a time. She also was leaving it--perhaps at this moment. It was very improbable that I should ever see her again. Why should I, indeed?

The question seemed a matter of course, and yet I sighed as I asked it of myself.

My leave-taking of the engineer was brief, but not unfriendly. He had already told me that he had "made it all right with the captain." He seemed at bottom a worthy man, and I parted from him with a mind at ease.

I had hoped to slip away from the boat unperceived, but the captain called to me as I was crossing the deck with my bundle. He told me that he had learned that I was the son of the late Customs-Accountant Hartwig in Uselin, whom he had known well. He had also heard of my misfortunes, but they were no affair of his. I had this day done the owners, and himself personally, an important service, and it was his duty to thank me for it, and to ask me if his owners and himself could not in some way testify their gratitude.

I said, "Yes; you can if you will take something more than common care of the man whose place I have filled today, and who would have done what I did had he been here."

The captain saw that it was no use to press me further; so he promised faithfully to comply with my request, and shook my hand heartily, saying that it would give him the greatest pleasure to meet me again.

This had occupied some time, and yet a carriage and horses, which I had noticed on the arrival of the steamer, were still standing on the wharf. Just as I approached them, however, they started off; but I caught a glimpse of a youthful face in a swan's-down hood vanishing from the window, from which it had been looking at something or some one on the wharf.

The luxurious carriage rolled away, and I gazed after it with a sigh. Not that I coveted the carriage with the two high-mettled bays. The distance from St. ---- to the capital was more than eighty miles, it was true, and I was obliged to economize the little sum I had saved up in the prison: but I knew that I could walk without much fatigue twenty-five or thirty miles a day, and I felt fresher and stronger than ever. It was therefore scarcely the carriage with the mettled bays for which my sighing heart was yearning.

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Chapter XIX

I had travelled during the day a long distance upon an interminable turnpike-road where the rows of poplars on each side stretched away until they met at the horizon in an acute angle which never widened, never came nearer, and whose unattainability was enough to drive the most patient traveller to desperation. The autumn rains had made the roads heavy and slippery to the feet. All the morning the wind had rustled with a melancholy sound in the half-leafless poplars, and about noon it had commenced to rain, and wet and dreary looked the sandy heaths and desolate fields on either side the road, while every human creature and every animal that I met wore a cheerless and dejected aspect. I had already given up the expectation of reaching the city that evening, so I felt it as an unhoped-for piece of good fortune when I saw a reddish-yellow glare of misty light rising above the horizon, which a solitary wanderer whom I had overtaken explained to be the reflection of the city-lights. And now indeed my enemies, the poplars, began to give place to suburban houses. The suburb was long enough, it is true, but houses can not hold out as long as poplars; and--"There is the gate," said at last my companion, and bade me good evening.

There was the gate. It was by no means imposing, and did not attract much attention from me. This, however, was excited by an accumulation of buildings immediately, to the left of the gate, which by their size, and the ruddy light shining through colossal windows, I inferred to belong to a large manufactory. A high iron railing divided the courtyard from the street, and in this railing was a wide gate, one side of which was standing open for the egress of the workmen, who were coming out, first one by one, then in groups, and finally in a compact throng. Outside the gate, they scattered in various directions, while some remained in groups about the gate, talking with animation. I heard the words "day's wages," "piece work," "quitting service," "notification," frequently repeated; but I could not catch the connection, and did not feel at liberty to ask any questions. Nearer to the railing, with her back toward me, was standing a young woman holding in front of her a little boy, who stood upon the stone foundation of the railing and held fast to the bars, gazing eagerly into the yard, down which dark figures were still coming, though in fewer numbers.

"What factory is this?" I asked, stepping up to the young woman.

She turned her head and answered, "The machine-works of Commerzienrath Streber. Keep still, George; your father will be along directly."

The feeble light of a street-lamp fell upon her pretty round face. The commerzienrath's machine-works--George, whose father was coming directly--the good-natured bright eyes--the full, red lips--I could not be mistaken.

"Christel Möwe!" I said; "Christel Pinnow! is this really you?"

"Bless my heart alive!" exclaimed the young woman, hastily putting down the child from the railing; "is it you, Herr George? See, George, this is your godfather;" and she held up the boy as high as she could, that he might have a better view of so important a personage, "How glad Klaus will be!"

She put the boy down again, who no sooner felt himself at liberty than he began to try his best to climb up to the railing again. I took him in my arms. "Are you a giant?" asked the little man, patting my head with his hands.

At this moment a square-built, grimy figure came up, apparently rather surprised to see his wife in such familiar conversation with a strange man, who had moreover his George in his arms; but before either Christel or I could say a word he tore his black felt cap from his head, waved it in the air like a conquering banner, and shouted, "Hurrah! here he is! George has come!"

It was long since any human lungs had emitted a cry of joy on my account, and it was probably owing to this novelty that at the good Klaus's exuberant greeting my eyes filled with tears, so that the whole scene--the factory, the houses, the street-lamps, the passing carriages, the black workmen, and even the little group of friends at my side--swam for a moment in a misty veil.

This emotion passed in a few moments, and we went on together, Klaus holding the little George on one arm, and clinging to the great George with the other, while Christel walked before, every instant looking over her shoulder at us with a smiling face.

Happily the distance through the crowded street was not long, and we soon reached a large and, to my eyes, stately house, the inside of which corresponded but poorly to its exterior. The hall was dimly lighted, and the floors black with dirt from innumerable footsteps that seemed to have traversed it the same day. The yard into which we passed was surrounded by lofty buildings, behind whose windows, feebly lighted here and there, there did not prevail that peace which a lover of quiet would have preferred. The stone staircase which we ascended to one of these rear-buildings was very steep, and, if possible, worse lighted and dirtier than the hall we had just entered. Persons passed us at every moment, who seemed far more reckless of the rules of politeness than was pleasant. I felt rather uncomfortable as we climbed from one landing to another, following Klaus, who gave no signs of halting, and at last in desperation I asked if we would not soon be there.

"Here we are!" said Klaus, knocking at a door, which was immediately opened from within, and from which, as it was opened, issued that penetrating odor which arises in an apartment where all day long the process of ironing freshly-starched linen is kept up. Any illusion as to the origin of this odor was the less possible, as the irons were at this moment in operation in the hands of two young women, who, as well as the third who had opened the door for us, cast glances of curiosity at the new arrival.

"So it goes on the whole day," said Klaus, with a glance of profoundest admiration at his wife, who had joined the ironers; "the whole day--only in the evening she allows herself a quarter of an hour to fetch me home from the works."

"You are a lucky fellow, Klaus," said I, in vain trying to draw a full breath in this atmosphere.

"Am I not?" replied Klaus, showing all his teeth, which had lost nothing of their glittering whiteness; "but that is not much yet. You must first see her babies!"

"And yours, Klaus?"

"And mine, of course," Klaus answered, in a tone which implied that it really was not worth while to allude to so unimportant a particular. "You must first see them!"

"I know one already."

"Yes; but the others! Her very image, every one! It is really ridiculous--really ridiculous," he repeated, with another glance of admiration at his little plump wife.

"You don't know what you are talking about, you stupid fellow," said the latter, turning sharply around, and laying a hand that bore traces of hard work, and yet was both white and small, on the mouth of her Klaus. "Let us go into the sitting-room. You must excuse me for keeping you here so long."

We went into the room, but Klaus did not rest until his wife had taken us into the chamber, where, beside two large beds, stood four little cribs, in which were sleeping four charming children, for my little namesake had by this time been put to bed by one of the young women.

"Isn't that too lovely!" said Klaus, drawing me from one blond head to another; "and all boys--all boys; but that just suits me: a girl I should expect to be exactly like her, and that is a simple impossibility--a simple impossibility."

Here Christel pushed me out of the bedroom, as she had before pushed me out of the kitchen.

"You stay here," she said to her husband, "and wash yourself, and fix yourself up decent, you great bear, as you ought when we have such a visitor."

Klaus showed his teeth with delight at his Christel's jest.

"Whatever I do, pleases him," said Christel, shutting the door with mock-disgust at his black face.

"Better that than if it were the other way," I said.

"Yes: but sometimes he carries it too far. I often am ashamed, and wonder what people think of it. And he gets worse every year; I really don't know what I shall do when the children are older; I often think they will lose all respect for their father."

While Christel thus unbosomed her secret woe, she was neatly and deftly setting the table, while I, standing before the stove, in which a cheerful fire was burning, thought of by-gone times: of that evening when I met the Wild Zehren first at Pinnow's forge, and how Christel had set the table and waited, and how she afterwards besought me not to go with him. Had I then followed her counsel! All would have been different. Perhaps better, perhaps not. But so it had happened, and----

"You must put up with what we have," said Christel.

"That I will, Christel, that I will!" I said, seizing both her hands and pressing them with a warmth which seemed a little to startle her.

"How wild you are still," she said, looking up at me with her blue eyes in surprise, but with no mixture of displeasure. "Exactly as you used to be."

"You don't like me any the less on that account, Christel, do you?"

She shook her head smiling: "Those used to be lively times."

"In winter, over the mulled wine," I said.

"And in summer, over the kaltschale," she replied.

"Especially when the old man was not at home," I added.

"Yes, indeed," she said; but her countenance took a serious expression, and she continued, looking at me gravely, "you know it then?"

"Know what, Christel?"

"That he----"

She laid her finger upon her lips and drew me, with an uneasy look at the chamber-door, further back into the room.

"He must not hear it--he has not got over it yet, though it is now more than three months ago."

"What was three months ago, Christel?" I asked in some alarm, for the young woman had turned quite pale, and cast uneasy glances first at me and then at the bed-room door.

"I hardly know how to tell you," she said. "He lived at last entirely alone, for no one would have anything to do with him, and even the deaf and dumb Jacob left him. Nobody knew exactly how he lived; and for a week no one had seen him, until one day the collector came for the house-tax, and--and found him hanging in the forge, over the hearth, where he must have been hanging nobody knows how long."

"Poor Klaus!" I said. "He must have felt it deeply, in spite of all."

"Indeed he did," said Christel. "And no one knows how he came to his death; whether he did it himself, or whether it was done by others; for they swore--at that time, you know--that they would settle with him one day."

"Very likely, very likely," I said.

"Here I am again," said Klaus, coming in in his best coat, and with a face as red as cold water, black soap, and a coarse towel, all applied in haste, could make it.

The supper, at which Christel's young assistants joined us, was soon over, and after the cloth had been removed, the girls dismissed, and Christel had mixed us a glass of grog, for which she had not forgotten her old recipe, Klaus and I fell into such discourse as naturally arises between old friends who have not seen each other for many years, and have gone through many experiences in the interval. I had to narrate to Klaus the story of my imprisonment from that time in the first year when he paid me that memorable visit, which was within a hair of bringing him into contact with the criminal law. Not that I could tell him, or even desired to tell him, everything, good fellow as he was. We do not admit our friends, even the most intimate, behind the inmost of the seven walls with which we prudently surround the citadel of our soul; but enough came to discourse to arouse the interest of the good Klaus to the highest pitch, and quite passionate was his sympathy when I came to speak of the last period of my imprisonment, when I fell into the hands of the new superintendent and his accomplice, the pious Deacon Von Krossow, and in seven worse than lean months had to expiate the seven years of fatness which I had hitherto enjoyed.

"The wretches! The villains! Is it possible? Are such things allowed?" the good Klaus kept muttering.

"Whether it is allowed or not, my dear Klaus, I cannot say; but that it is possible is only too certain. Under the most frivolous pretexts in the world I was deprived of my place as secretary, and treated as an unusually ill-disposed and contumacious prisoner; and as all that did not satisfy their vengeance, I was ordered seven months of disciplinary punishment beside."

"And what did the good old overseer whom I saw with you that day say to that?"

"Sergeant Süssmilch? He would have sworn terribly, I promise you, if he had seen it. Fortunately, he went away with the family of Herr von Zehren a week after the death of the latter."

"I would never have done that," said Klaus with emphasis; "I would never have left you alone in their robber-den."

"But he had other claims upon him, of longer standing, Klaus."

"All the same: I would not have left you."

Then I told how I had been discharged at last, how my first visit had been to my native town, and the reception I met with there.

"Poor George! poor George!" said Klaus, over and over again, shaking his big head in sympathy.

"But you have had a harder trial still, poor fellow," I said.

"Who told you that?" asked Klaus, quickly.

"She did," I answered, pointing to the room in which Christel had been for the last five minutes busied in a vain attempt to quiet the wails of her youngest.

"Hush," said Klaus, "we must not speak of it so that she can hear; it is different with us men, but a little woman like that--it always has a dreadful effect upon her, poor thing: I am frightened whenever any legal paper comes in about the adjustment of the estate--you understand."

"Your father left a very respectable sum, did he not?"

"God forbid," said Klaus. "They must have robbed him, or else he buried it; and either is very possible, for at last he did not trust in any human creature, and had little reason to, God knows. And he always had a secret way in everything. Just think; we believed that Christel had floated to land, as naked and destitute as a fish flung up by the tide, without the least possibility of discovering the name of the ship in which she was wrecked, much less her own. And what does she find in the great cupboard, opposite the door, you know, but a bundle of papers in a tin case, which evidently belonged to the same ship; these papers were the captain's, and his name is written in them, with the name of the ship, and how he was married, and that his young wife had given birth to a child at sea; and there was a slip of paper besides, saying that the ship could not now be saved, and that it was impossible to save their lives, so he would fasten the child and the papers, which he had put in a tin case, to a piece of cork, and trust them to the sea and to God's mercy. So there is no doubt that my Christel is this child of the Dutch captain, whose name was Tromp--Peter Tromp, and his ship The Prince of Orange, and he was on his way home from Java. But I am not the least surprised at it all," Klaus concluded; "I should not be surprised if I she had turned out to be the daughter of the Emperor of Morocco----"

"And had come down from the sky in a chariot drawn by twelve peacocks," I said.

"No; not even then," replied Klaus, with immense emphasis, after a moment's reflection.

"And what have you done with the papers?" I inquired, with a smile.

"I have had them translated; nothing else."

"But that is not right," I said. "The papers might possibly lead to the discovery of a rich uncle, or something of the sort. Such things have happened before, Klaus."

"That is just what Doctor Snellius says."

"Who says?" I asked in astonishment.

"Doctor Snellius," Klaus repeated. "Your old friend in the prison. He is now the physician to the factory: did he never write to tell you?"

"No; or else the letter was intercepted, which is very possible. So he is your doctor, eh?--the doctor of the factory, I mean."

"Well, yes; I call him so, because he is always sent for when anything happens; but in truth he is, I believe, the doctor of all the poor in this part of the city."

"He must have a heavy practice, then."

"Heaven knows he has; but he will never grow rich with it, for he never takes a penny unless they can well spare it, which is not often the case, and frequently he gives them medicine besides. Ah, he has a noble soul; though he always seems as if he were going to eat you up, and the children scream whenever he comes in the door."

"And he is your doctor too, then?"

"Oh yes, of course: that is, we have really only called him in once--the last time--very much against Christel's will, who insisted that----but that you will not understand; a married man's cares, you know; and she was quite right, as it happened----"

"As always, Klaus."

"As always."

"And why do you not make some investigations about those papers?"

Klaus scratched his ear.

"Well, I don't know," he said. "We feel somehow--we are living so happily now, and I always think things can not be better; more likely worse. If she really had a rich aunt--we always suppose it is an aunt--and she should leave her property to Christel, what in the world should we do with all the money? I can't think, for my part."

"Suppose, for example, you lent it to me: I should know what to do with it."

"Yes, that is true," cried Klaus, "I never thought of that. That would be something for you, sure enough. To-morrow morning I will advertise in all the papers: I'll bring the aunt if she lives a hundred thousand miles off."

"But suppose it is an uncle?"

"No, no, it is an aunt," said Klaus, with an air of assurance.

"So be it!" said I, arising. "And now let us take a little walk. I must take a look at my new home."

There is probably no time in the twenty-four hours better fitted to impress a provincial with the greatness of a large city than the twilight of a gloomy autumn evening. In men of any liveliness of imagination the reality usually falls short of the fancy, but in an hour like this the reality and the fancy--what we perceive and what we imagine--blend indistinguishably together, and the barriers of the actual world seem broken down.

Such an evening was it when I strolled with Klaus through the streets of the city, which seemed enormous and gigantic in my eyes. Even now I can sometimes in the evening, and for a moment, behold it in the same light and with the same feelings as then. Coming from a region inhabited by workmen, we crossed in our walk one of the most brilliant quarters to reach the city proper, and returned through large squares, surrounded by magnificent palaces, to our own gloomy region again. And everywhere was the throng of hurrying crowds on the narrow sidewalks, and the rattle and thunder of vehicles, and the endless rows of lamps up and down the interminable streets, and the blaze of light from the shops illuminating the streets so that the figures of men, wagons and horses were strangely reflected from the wet pavement. Then the imposing masses of tall buildings, rising above one another like mountains; the sight here of a bronze equestrian statue upon a pedestal, high as a house, riding aloft through the night, and then of a giant figure pointing down at us with a drawn sword; wide bridges with balustrades peopled with white marble forms, and under whose arches rolled a black flood upon which quivered the reflections of a thousand lights; a glance into the shops where to uninitiated eyes the treasures of Arabia and the Indies seemed heaped up by fairy hands; dark yards, where, late as it was, mighty casks and chests were being piled by leather-aproned men--I walked, and stopped to gaze, and went on, and stopped again, staring, astonished, but not confounded, and altogether strangely happy. Was this the sea of ever-rolling life, engulfing itself and ever producing itself anew, towards which my teacher's prophecy had directed me--the sea whose mighty billows, if he had foreseen truly, where to be my home? Yes: this it was: this it must be. I felt it in the courageous beatings of my heart, in the power with which I clove this surge of men, in the delight with which I listened to the roar of this surf.

PART THIRD.

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Chapter I

In the machine-works of the commerzienrath a great boiler was being riveted. Three sooty workmen, with shirt-sleeves rolled above the elbows, and hammers in their strong hands, were waiting for the red-hot bolt which a fourth was bringing in the jaws of a pair of pincers from an adjacent forge. The bolt vanished into the boiler, and appeared in a few seconds through the rivet-hole; the cyclops grasped their hammers firmly, and, striking in measured cadence, finished the rivet-head. This hammering produced a tremendous noise.

And if any one had told a spectator, uninitiated to the craft, that in the hollow of the boiler upon which the heavy hammers fell with such deafening clangor, there lay a man upon his back who received the rivet in a pair of pincers, and with these exerted all his strength in resistance, while the hammers were ringing on the rivet-head, the uninitiated spectator would scarce have believed it, and he could not fail to consider the man in the hollow of the boiler as one of the most miserable and most to be pitied of mortals.

The riveting was finished, the hammers at rest; the man with the pincers crawled out of the belly of the monster. I need scarcely tell the reader who this man with the pincers was. Nor am I ashamed thus to appear before him, for he has very likely seen me in similar costume, though it is true that at this moment I present a rather frightful appearance. The lower part of my face, my neck and breast, are covered with blood, which during the last hour has been running from my nose and mouth. But the three with the hammers only laugh; and one, the foreman, says:

"Next time remember to keep your mouth open, comrade, no roast pigeons will fly into it."

Rather a poor joke, it must be owned; but the rest laugh, and I laugh too: for as the prudent proverb advises us to "howl with the wolves," so I have rarely been able to refrain from joining in any laughter, even when, as at present, it was at my own expense.

But despite the ardent zeal with which I entered into my new calling, I was not sorry that this work inside the boiler was but a temporary task, for which the foreman of my shop had lent me because another shop happened to be shorthanded, very unwillingly, and only at the order of the foreman of the works. To say that he did it very unwillingly sounds like a brag from one who like myself had only been a fortnight in the shop, and whose only work yet had been of the roughest sort, such as handling the sledge. Nor was it any merit of mine that the heavy sledge which others handled with difficulty was as light in my hands as an ordinary fore-hammer, and that my blow could easily be distinguished among the four or five that followed in regular cadence the foreman's stroke upon the glowing iron. It was no merit of mine; and yet in this place, where bodily strength played so important a part, it counted as a high one, even the highest. My foreman was proud of me; my fellow-workmen, in the most literal sense, looked up to me with admiration; and Klaus, whenever my name happened to be mentioned, showed all his white teeth, then shut his lips tight, held up his forefinger, and nodded mysteriously. I had strictly forbidden Klaus to indulge in these mysterious gestures, and Klaus had solemnly promised to avoid them, but in spite of all it was not his fault if all the two hundred hands in the establishment did not have the same exalted opinion of me with which his honest soul was overflowing.

"I declare," said Klaus--whenever I imparted to him some bit of information from my theoretical knowledge of machinery, or from my mathematical acquirements--"you know more about these things than any man in the works, the head-foreman and the engineers not excepted, and you deserve to be at least Chief of the Technical Bureau."

"You are a simpleton, Klaus," I said.

"But it is true, for all," answered he doggedly.

"No, Klaus, it is not true. In the first place, you far over-estimate my knowledge, and in the second place, one can be a very good theorist and at the same time a wretched bungler in practice. But I want to be both a good theorist and a skilful workman, and I must give many a stroke of hammer and of file before I get to be that. Just remember, Klaus, what a time it took you to rise from the common job-workman, who was glad if he could dress his round pliers decently, to the skilful machinist who can fit the straps on a connecting-rod as well as the best--"

"Yes," said Klaus, "but then you and I----"

"Forging is done everywhere at a fire, Klaus, and every piece must be hammered until it is finished; and so must a good machinist until he is finished; and there is much to be done before I can say that of myself, if I ever can."

"I am of a different opinion, then," answered the obstinate Klaus.

"Then be so good as to keep that opinion to yourself," I said, very earnestly.

I had good reasons for enjoining the honest Klaus to a silence which was so burdensome to him; for, beside the fact that he really had a ridiculously exaggerated opinion of me, his imprudence might be of serious inconvenience to me, and indeed might close against me the way which I was firmly resolved to tread. I wished to work my way up from the ranks in the calling to which I had devoted my life, remembering the saying of my never-to-be-forgotten teacher, that the true artist must understand the hand-work of his art. So for the present I was what I desired to be--a hand-worker, a laborer in the roughest work--and every one took me for just that, which was precisely what I wished.

My past history I had veiled under a simple story, which found ready belief with the simple fellows around me. I was the son of a seafaring man in Klaus Pinnow's native town. We had known each other from our boyhood; I had made up my mind to be a smith like him, and had worked awhile as an apprentice with his father. But ten years ago I had gone to sea, and had voyaged about the whole world as sailor, as ship's-carpenter, and, as ship's-blacksmith, and only returned home a short time before with the determination of quitting the sea for the future, and earning an honest living on land, for which purpose I was now learning the smith's craft regularly, which I had practiced as an apprentice.

I was seldom under the necessity of corroborating this story by accounts of my past adventures; and if now and then, when we were off work, some one more curious than the rest spoke of my travels, I understood enough of navigation and voyages, and had mixed too much with captains and mates, and read too many tales of the sea, not to be able to play the part of Sindbad for half an hour. One of my principal stories, the scene of which was laid somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, in which there was plenty of hot work and plenty of pirates knocked in the head, had procured me in the shop the nickname of "The Malay," which I bore until--but I must not anticipate.

I was all the more readily believed to be what I gave myself out for, as I conformed my habits exactly to those of the common workman. I was dressed neither better nor worse than the rest; I ate my breakfast from my hand, as did the others; I dined at a cheap cook-shop, in which some fifty other workmen took their dinners. The only luxury which I allowed myself out of the little money which I had brought from the prison was a better lodging than workmen of my class were accustomed to or could afford; and this deviation from the rule was due as much to necessity as to any consideration of comfort or taste. I could not, if I wished to prosecute my theoretical studies, live in a quarter where the streets were noisy until deep in the night with the rattling of vehicles, and too often with the uproar of drunken workmen in conflict with the police, and where, in the overcrowded houses, the ticking, pulsating, clattering clock of human life never stood still a moment.

For several days, during which I was Klaus's guest, I had looked about for a suitable lodging; and at last I found one.

Adjoining the factory was a large lot of ground, which was covered in the most singular way with buildings, some half-finished and others only commenced. According to the account of the old man who, in a half-finished porter's lodge, exercised a sort of guardianship over the place, the whole had been intended as an establishment to compete with Streber's. But the projector of the scheme had failed, the property was put up at auction and bought in by a wealthy creditor, who thought the best thing he could do with it for the present was to leave all things as they were.

"You see," said the old man, "he hopes that in two or three years the ground will be worth three times as much as it now is; and perhaps also that the commerzienrath must of necessity take the thing off his hands at any price, since it is of the utmost importance to him to keep a rival from starting up, so to speak, under his very nose. And then the commerzienrath has to put up new buildings, for they are so crowded they can hardly work, and where is he to build if not just on these lots? But he thinks it over, and my employer thinks it over, and now they have both been thinking it over for these two years. Recently he has been here again and looked over the place for the twentieth or fiftieth time, I believe; but it did not seem that he had come to any determination. Well, it is all one to me; and if you, sir, would like one of the rooms in the garden-house, your beard may be grown two inches longer before you have to move out."

The satirical old porter pleased me well, and the garden-house still better. True it was a mere boast when the man spoke of "one of the rooms," while in reality it had but one in which a human being could possibly live, while the others, without doors or windows, seemed rather to be a caravanserai for homeless cats: an appearance which I found afterwards to be fully borne out by the facts. The little house, which was probably originally intended for the residence of the owner or manager, was planned in a very pleasing Italian style. An easy flight of stairs led to the rooms referred to, in which, to judge from the spots of ink on the unscrubbed floors, and several three-legged drawing-tables, and other similar bits of ruinous furniture, the architect of the building must have had his office; on the other side was a balcony. In front of the stairs a grass-plot had been designed, but at present it was only a plot without the grass; and similarly a great free-stone basin in the centre lacked the Triton and the water; and the trellis, which ran up between the windows, as high up as the projecting eaves, lacked its Venetian ivy. But I cared nothing for these deficiencies; on the contrary I regarded them as pointing to a better future, and they harmonized thus with my own frame of mind, which also looked from a barren present to richer and fairer days to come. Then this ruinous lodging had the real practical advantage of suitable cheapness, and also that of securing me the quiet which was so necessary to my studies; and, to tell the whole, the old man had told me that the young lady who had accompanied the commerzienrath, and must have been the old gentleman's daughter, had clapped her hands when she saw the garden-house, and said it was charming, and she would like to live in it.

"She'd soon get out of that notion," said the old growler. "She did not look as if the owl was her house-builder, and Skinflint her cook; but for one of our--I mean of your--sort, it will suit very well."

"It suits me exactly," I said; "and now, when can I move in?"

"When you please; no one has been before you, so you will not have to wait for the tenant to move out."

So on the same evening I took possession of my new lodging, with the assistance of the good Klaus, whose head scarcely stopped shaking the whole time.

What did I want with such a tumble-down old ruin, where I might be murdered and not a dog bark? And how could I fancy such furniture: two worm-eaten high-backed chairs, an arm-chair about a hundred years old, a table with clumsy twisted legs, and a looking-glass with tarnished gilt frame? To be sure, I had bought the rubbish cheap enough of a dealer in second-hand furniture, but for very little more he would have given me things of a very different sort; but somehow I had always had a strange sort of taste in those matters, and he remembered that I used to have a lot of just such useless rubbish in my own room in my father's house in Uselin.

So the good Klaus grumbled and scolded, and even Christel was seriously out of humor with me for some days. She had discovered a room in her own house, on the courtside, up two pair of stairs, beautifully furnished, and having only the inconvenience that to get to it one had to go through the kitchen and the landlady's room. And the landlady was a particularly respectable tailor's widow of eighty-two, with an excellent unmarried daughter of sixty, who would certainly have taken the very best care of me.

The honest Klaus and the good Christel! I could not help them; I could not for their sakes change my nature, to which this striving for freedom and independence was an absolute necessity. In my garret in my father's house, in my room at Castle Zehrendorf, even in my prison cell, I had ever felt too deeply the luxury and poetry of solitude to be able to dispense with it now that I was a man.

And now again I was alone in my room in the half-finished garden-house, among the ruins of buildings, large and small, that never would be completed. In the evening, when I looked up from my books, no sound reached me but the hollow unceasing rumble of vehicles, like the distant roll of the sea, or the bark of the shaggy poodle that by day kept the old man company in the porter's lodge, and in the evening and all night long traversed the spaces between the ruins and the ruins themselves, in, as it seemed to me, an interminable hunt after cats.

And when occasionally, to cool my heated head, I stepped out upon the balcony, all again was deserted, vacant, and dark around, only here and there the light of a solitary lamp, and sometimes a red pillar of flame which rose from one of the furnace-chimneys of our works into the night sky, and reddened the edges of the dark clouds which a sharp November wind drove before it. Then, when I returned to my room, how cheerful looked my modest lamp, before which lay open my book with figures and formulas; how cosily the old carven oak furniture, which had so moved the spleen of the good Klaus; and above all, with what pleasure I contemplated the two small antique vases of terracotta upon the mantel-piece, and the beautiful copy of the Sistine Madonna, which hung on the wall facing my worktable. The picture and the vases had been taken from my cell when the new superintendent came, but upon my release I had demanded them with so fixed a determination that they did not venture to withhold them: so I had packed them carefully in a box and placed them in the hands of a person whom I could trust, to be forwarded to me whenever I should have fixed myself somewhere. This very day they had arrived, and to-night, for the first time, again I enjoyed the pleasure of gazing at them.

And while I contemplated these precious relics I reproached myself earnestly that I had never prevailed upon myself to visit or give any token of my existence to the dearest friend I had in the world, in the same city with whom I had now been living a fortnight. It seemed so entirely contrary to my nature not at once to obey the impulse of my heart, and that so urgent an impulse--not to hasten without delay to her with whom I had lived in closest friendship so many years of my life, and whose heart I was convinced beat as warmly for me as ever. We had not kept up a very lively correspondence during the year of our separation, but we had agreed when we parted that we would not write except upon some especial emergency, as anything like a correspondence carried on under the eyes of the new superintendent and Herr von Krossow seemed an impossibility. An emergency of this kind occurred, when the baseness of this well-matched pair procured me a seven months' addition to my term of incarceration: I wrote to her, simply acquainting her with the fact, and she answered with but a word: "Endure."

No, this was not the cause of my reluctance; and indeed it had but one, which I was unwilling to admit, even to myself I knew how the dearest, noblest girl had to work and to care for herself and for those dear to her. For a year it had been my dearest wish--indeed it often seemed to me the single aim and object of my life--to attain a position that would enable me to lift this load from her frail shoulders. And now, when she perhaps more than ever needed a friend, a supporter, I must appear before her in a condition in which, even if I needed no assistance myself, I was utterly unable to afford it to others. That might have been foreseen; as things were, it was inevitable, and yet----

But will she, then, will she ever accept my assistance? I interrupted the course of my thoughts as I paced up and down my room with my hands behind me, a habit I had caught from my father. Has she not given me a hundred proofs how jealous she is of her independence? And has she not given me especially to understand, even at our parting, that if she should require a support it should not be my arm?

I called to mind the last days that I had spent with Paula and her family. There were not many of them, for they had urged Frau von Zehren to make room for her husband's successor with an insistance that was really indecent. This successor, a major on half-pay, and a special pet of the pietistic president, had long waited for the place, and, so to speak, had been standing at the door. The brutality with which he took possession at once of the superintendent's house, without the least consideration for the bereaved family, was really unexampled. He had given the afflicted lady the alternative of removing with her family to one of the prison cells, which he magnanimously offered to have cleared out for their occupation, or of taking refuge in one of the wretched taverns of the town. Frau von Zehren, of course, had not hesitated a moment as to what was to be done; and thus within three days after the death of my benefactor all the old familiar faces had vanished from the house in which he had lived so long. All had gone. Doctor Snellius, in the very first hour in which he had the questionable honor of being presented to the new superintendent, spoke his mind to him in full; and when Doctor Snellius spoke his mind to any one whom he had reason to despise and abhor, you might rest assured that the individual addressed would not have the slightest ground to complain of any obscurity in the doctor's expressions.

Immediately upon his heel followed old Sergeant Süssmilch; and although the register of the old man's voice lay fully two octaves lower than the doctor's, yet the melody which both sang must have been the same; at all events the result in both cases was identical, namely, Major D. foamed with rage, then stamped with his feet, and ordered the insolent fellow to be put in the dungeon immediately. Happily, the old man had been prudent enough to ask for and to obtain his discharge before he thoroughly eased his heart to his new chief, who therefore, rage as he might, had no authority over the old man, and on Sergeant Süssmilch threats were thrown away.

How gladly would I have followed these enticing examples, and spoken my mind also to the new superintendent. Probably in my whole life I have never exercised such constraint over myself as in those days, when I saw this miserable creature occupying the place which that noble man had left; and in all likelihood I should not have succeeded, and should have plunged myself into far worse misfortune, had not a voice perpetually sounded in my ear which was more potent with me than the impulse of my heart. And this voice said: "You have already endured much, poor George; bear this also, though it be the hardest of all, and if you cannot control yourself, call to mind him who loved you as his own son."

I sat down to my book again and turned the leaves; but this night I could not fix my attention on even the simplest things. Old well-known algebraic formulas wore a quite strange appearance, and seemed to form themselves into the words: If he loved me as his son, and she was the best beloved of his children, should she and I not also love each other?

"Are you going to keep your light burning all night?" called the voice of the old watchman from below. "It is now one o'clock, and I am to wake you at five, and a nice job I will have of it!"

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Chapter II

In another shop of our establishment several men had been wounded, more or less dangerously, by the slipping of a belt. In our shop we had heard the news of the accident just before dinner, and the men were standing about the yard inquiring the particulars and talking it over. I had joined one of the groups, and was listening attentively, when I saw a little man pushing through the crowd, with his hat in his hand, and whose great bald skull emerging here and there between these dark figures resembled the full moon sailing through black clouds. This skull could only belong to one man. I hastened in pursuit, and overtook it by the gate at the moment when it was covered with a felt hat, which had not improved in appearance since I last saw it. I followed the felt hat a few steps in the street, and then with a stride placed myself beside its wearer.

"Permit me, doctor," I said.

Doctor Snellius brought his round spectacles to bear on me, and stared at me with a look of the profoundest astonishment.

"It is no hallucination, doctor," I said; "this is really myself."

"George, mammoth, man, how come you here, and in this questionable shape?" cried the doctor, holding out both his hands.

"Hush, doctor," I said, "I am here incognito, and must deny myself the pleasure of embracing you."

"Don't tell me you have run away, and that too after I expressly forbade you," said the doctor, in a low, anxious tone.

I set his mind at rest on this point.

"Heaven be thanked!" he said; "not forgetting also to thank me, or rather her. How did you find her?"

"I have not yet seen her, doctor."

"And you have been here two weeks? Shameful! incredible! Where is my lantern, that I may dash it to pieces, for now I give up forever the hope of finding a man. Go! I will never see you again."

"When shall I come to see you, doctor?"

"Whenever you will, or can: shall we say this evening? eh? A glass of grog in the old fashion, half-and-half, eh?"

And over a glass of grog, half-and-half in the old fashion. Doctor Snellius and I faced each other that very evening, in his more roomy lodging, and talked of by-gone times, of what we had gone through together, as two old friends talk who meet for the first time after long separation.

The doctor gave me a drastic description of his great scene with Major D., and how Herr von Krossow had come in, and how he had said that it was true that three made a college, but for the whole world he would not make a college with those two, and that he begged to take leave of them at once and forever. I answered, laughing, that I now could understand the vindictiveness with which I was persecuted by Herr von Krossow, whom I had never offended.

"You are mistaken, my dear fellow," said the doctor. "The reptile had other and better reasons for turning his fangs upon you. I can tell you now that there is no danger of your wringing the miscreant's neck. So now listen; but mix yourself a glass first--you will not get it down without a good swig. This it was: he had once before paid his court to her--to Paula von Zehren; and as he received one mitten, he thought he might venture to apply for the other. For this purpose he selected as the fittest time those days of grief and distraction immediately after her father's death, nor did he forget to remind her that the new superintendent was his good friend, and the president his cousin, and that through these two he held the fortunes of Paula and her family, so to speak, in his hands; for her mother's claim to a pension was, as she knew herself, open to dispute; but the thing could be managed; and although he had no property of his own, he had good connections, and by no means bad prospects, especially under the new king, who was in truth an anointed of the Lord. What do you think of that?" crowed Doctor Snellius, springing up and performing a grotesque dance through the room.

The doctor's statement filled me with astonishment and indignation. I had had no idea that the sanctimonious deacon had dared to raise his hypocritical eyes to Paula; and this suggested the thought that I might probably have been equally dim of sight in another quarter. I sank into a gloomy silence; but the doctor must have read my thoughts in my face through his great round spectacles.

"You are thinking that it cost her no great effort to dismiss the priest when her heart was already in the possession of the knight? I know we often spoke of it and made each other uneasy, but it was all nonsense, I assure you, all nonsense. Paula no more thinks of marrying the young Adonis than an old satyr like me."

The doctor gave me a side-glance at these words, and smiled sardonically as I involuntarily murmured a heart-felt "Thank heaven!"

"Don't rejoice too soon, though," he went on, and his smile grew ever more diabolic; "we must not praise the day before the evening, and you know my doctrine, that with men anything is possible. Arthur is really a most fascinating youth, and now he has worked himself into the diplomatic career, he may well die our Minister to London. It is the same trade, and that they understand--ah! don't they understand it? especially the old man, who really is a genius in the noble art. From his tailor, whom he cajoles until the man gives him credit again, up to the king, whom he without hesitation petitions for a subsidy that will enable him to pay his debts and push his Arthur in his new career, no man is safe from him--no man. I warn you button up your pockets when you meet the gentleman on the street."

"He lives here, then?"

"Of course, he lives here. The soil here is not so soon exhausted, and a great man like the Herr Steuerrath needs a wide field everywhere. Oh these brows, these brows of brass!"

"Why do we talk so much of such a crew?" I asked. "Rather tell me something about her. How does she live? How does she get on with her painting? Has she made great progress? And has she found sale for her pictures?"

"Made progress? Find sale?" cried the doctor. "Pretty questions, indeed! I tell you she is in a fair way to make her fortune. They fairly fight over her pictures."

"Doctor," I said, "I do not think this is a proper subject for jesting."

The doctor, who had spoken in his shrillest tones, tuned down his voice a couple of octaves by an energetic "ahem!" and said:

"You are right; but it is no jest--merely a lie. As I see, however, that I have not made any progress in the art of lying, it is probably best for me to tell you, or rather show you, the truth. Come with me."

He lighted two candles that stood under the looking-glass, and led me into an adjoining room, which he had first to unlock.

"I have put them here," he said, pointing to the wall, which was hung with large and small pictures, "because they are not safe from the boys anywhere else. Now what do you think of them?"

Taking the candles from the doctor, and letting the light fall upon the pictures, I saw at once that they were all by Paula's hand. I had too long watched her studies, and too deeply entered into her way of seeing and of reproducing what she saw, to be liable to any error.

There were three or four heads, all idealized, the originals of which I fancied that I recognized; two or three genre-pieces--scenes from the prison, which I had already seen in the first draught; and finally a landscape--a great reach of coast with stormy sea--the sketch of which I remembered perfectly. At this time I understood but little of painting, and least of all did I know how to justify my opinion when formed. Now I can say that I really perceived a decisive improvement in these pictures--an improvement both in the technical execution and in the freer and broader style of treatment: especially did the heads strike me as exhibiting remarkable power, and I enthusiastically expressed my opinion to the doctor in the best words I could find.

"Yes," said he, leaning his head first on one side and then on the other, and contemplating the pictures with melancholy pride, "you are right; perfectly right. She is a genius; but of what use is genius when it has no name? The world is stupid, my friend; incredibly stupid: it can discover anything grand or beautiful soon enough when the one or two enlightened heads that a century produces have given their testimony to it, one after the other; then the thing is an article of faith that the boys recite from their benches and the sparrows chatter upon the roofs. But when the gentlemen have to pass judgment upon the work of an author whose name they have never before heard, or the picture of an artist who comes before them for the first time, then they are at the end of their lesson and do not know what to think. How long would these pictures have travelled from one exhibition to another, or hung in the dealers' shops, if I had allowed them to hang there? So they have all travelled into my possession, and not to America, England, and Russia, as the good Paula believes. But do not look so seriously at me. My part of Mæcenas did not last long; her last picture at the Artists' Exposition--you know it, and are in it yourself--Richard the Lion-heart sick in his tent, visited by an Arab physician: well, that picture, as I hear, has been bought by the commerzienrath--your commerzienrath--strange to say, for the man knows just as much about paintings as I do about making money, and Paula, by my advice, fixed its price at a considerable sum. You see I am now superfluous. Sic tansit gloria!"

The doctor sighed deeply, and then preceded me with the two candles in his hands, casting flickering lights upon his broad skull.

We took our seats again behind the glasses of grog. The doctor seemed disposed to drown the deep melancholy that had possessed him by doubting the strength of his potations, while I sat in deep meditation. The fact that the commerzienrath had bought Paula's picture set me to pondering. I knew of old how absolutely indifferent the man was to everything connected with art, and that the relationship had in any way moved him to the purchase was the unlikeliest thing in the world. It was therefore no very chimerical conclusion that the daughter had more to do in the affair than the father; and I confess that as I reckoned up the probabilities of this supposition the blood rushed to my cheeks. In fact the hypothesis stood or fell on a certain point, which was yet uncertain. I drew a long breath, took a deep draught from my glass, and asked:

"Has King Richard still any likeness----"

"To you, my most esteemed friend; to you? Do not vex yourself with any doubts on that score," answered Doctor Snellius with a promptness that seemed to indicate that our thoughts had met in the same point. "The only fault I have to find with it is just this, that Paula seems to have fancied that she had only to take you as you were, and there was a king ready made. Have the goodness not to take credit to yourself for what is merely her poverty of invention."

"I think I have not yet given you any reason to hold me exceptionally vain," I said.

"No; heaven knows you have not; you deserve rather to descend to posterity in the character of St. Simon Stylites than as Richard C[oe]ur de Lion."

"You say that as bitterly as if you were seriously dissatisfied with me."

"And so I am, my good sir," cried the doctor. "What kind of a crochet is it to live by the labor of your hands, when you can live by your head? Do you know, sir, that our departed friend said to me, not long before his death, that you had the most remarkable talent for mathematics he had ever known, and that you could at any time take charge of the highest class in a public school? Do you suppose that your head grows acuter just in proportion as your hands grow coarser? You will say, like the tailor to Talleyrand, il faut vivre; and a journeyman blacksmith will make a living easier than a teacher of mathematics. Well, have you no friends that could help you? Why did you not come to me at once? Why did you leave it for chance to decide whether we should meet or not?"

I endeavored to calm his irritation, showing him that I had taken my present course, not from necessity but conviction; but he would not yield the point.

"Why did you take the trouble to make a virtue of necessity? Necessity was your adviser, necessity and your confounded pride to boot. You would have set out in quite another way, if you had had any capital to back you."

"But you see I have none, doctor."

"Don't you contradict me, you brainless mammoth! A friend who has capital that he places at our disposal is a capital of our own. I am your friend, I have capital, and I place it at your disposal. Who knows if in this I do not accomplish a work more pleasing to heaven than if I followed my old father's wishes and employed it in assisting orphan asylums and other such childish undertakings. You are an orphan; so in helping you I follow the words if not the intention of that pious man, and shall be perfectly easy in conscience on that score."

"But I shall not," I replied, laughing.

"Don't laugh, you monster!" cried the doctor. "You don't seem to comprehend that my proposition is perfectly serious. Take my money--there are fifty thousand thalers, or thereabouts--go into partnership with the commerzienrath; or better, found a rival establishment, and hoist him out of his saddle: in a few years you will be the first manufacturer and machinist of Germany, and----"

While the doctor thus spoke in feverish excitement the blood had rushed to his head in a really alarming manner. He suddenly checked himself, and it was not until long after that I learned what it was that required such an effort to suppress. It may be that my head, in consequence of my long sitting behind the grog, was by no means perfectly clear; at all events only thus can I explain the obstinacy with which I still contradicted the doctor and maintained that my sense of independence would never allow me to use the capital and assistance of another as the foundation of my fortune.

"Do you know what you are proclaiming in this?" cried the doctor in his shrillest tones, and wrathfully smiting the table--"that you will remain a beggar, a miserable beggarly fellow, as every one has done who was fool enough to try to drag himself out of the swamp by his own hair? No, no, my good sir; the art is to let others work for you. Whoever does not understand this, is and remains a beggar."

"What would our best friend have said if he had heard you talk thus?"

"Has he not in life and death proven the truth of it?" crowed the pugnacious doctor. "Do you call it living as a reasonable man, to leave the dearest we have on earth in poverty at our death? And what are the great results of all his long, self-sacrificing, heroic labor for the general good? He fancied, this high-priest of humanity, that his example would suffice to bring about an entire reform of the prison system. And now an old pedant of a king has but to shut his sleepy eyes, and the foundation of his edifice gives way; and as soon as he himself commits the folly of dying, it falls to ruin like a house of cards. If that be not folly I do not know how loud the bells must jingle."

"I know somebody whose cap is quite as well furnished," I said, looking the doctor full in the eyes. "What do you call a man who--as the only son of a rich old father who loves the son and lets him follow his own course, even though he does not comprehend it, with the certain prospect of a considerable inheritance--performs for years the laborious work of a prison-surgeon for the most trivial pay; who, after he has come into the possession of this estate, continues to labor as the physician of the poorest of the poor, and finally, because the weight of his wealth is too burdensome, throws it into the lap of the first man he meets, to die the same irreclaimable beggarly fellow that he has lived?"

"Did I ever pretend to be anything else?" asked my antagonist, not without some mark of confusion. "Oh yes, as if it were only the simplest thing in the world to be a child of prudence. To produce that result requires generations, for shrewdness must be bred in families, like the long legs of race-horses. Take the commerzienrath, who is a classic example how shrewdness grows and thrives when it is once properly grafted on a family stock: the man's grandfather was a needleman, who kept a little shop by the harbor-gate in S.; my own grandfather knew him well. He was a disreputable old fellow, who sold nails and needles in his front shop, and lent money on pawns in the back room. Then came his son, who was at least a head above his father, and could read and write, and calculate much better than the old man. He settled in your town and bought shares of ships, and finally whole ships, and paved the way for his son, who is the biggest of the lot. His flourishing period came in Napoleon's time. Napoleon and the blockade and the smuggling business made a rich man of him. Yes, smuggling--the same smuggling that cost your friend his life. When the Herr Commerzienrath was a smuggler, smuggling was a kind of patriotic work, and the poor devils who risked and lost their lives at it were martyrs of the good cause. God only knows how many men's lives he has on his conscience. And when afterwards the people who had got into the way of the business would not quit it, and indeed could not, or they would have starved, he was safe enough; he had brought his sheep out of the rain and could laugh in his sleeve. Then came the time of army-contracts, and that again was a good time for him; and thus this leech kept sucking and gorging himself with the blood of his fellow-creatures. Everything that he undertook succeeded; the needleman's grandson and broker's son has become a millionaire, has married a woman of noble birth, has titles, orders--all that the heart can desire. Look you, there is a child of prudence, whom I recommend to you as an example."

"That I may lose your and every worthy man's friendship?"

"What good is my friendship to you? My friendship at best is worth but fifty thousand thalers. You are quite right not to put yourself out of your way for such a trifle. Marry Hermine Streber--then you will know why you were a beggarly fellow."

"It seems that one falls into this category by having either a great deal of money or none at all," I said, hiding under a loud laugh my embarrassment at his brusque suggestion.

"Certainly," said the doctor, still heated. "Extremes meet, and for this reason I consider your destiny inevitable. The question only is, how to deal with the old man; with the daughter the business is half done, or more than half. Your meeting on the steamer was capital; and now this Richard the Lion-heart in effigy, as long as she has him not in propria personæ----"

"Doctor," I said, rising, "I think it must be time to say good-night."

"As you please," replied the doctor. "You know with such remarkable exactitude what is good for you that most likely you know this too."

The doctor had also arisen and was now walking up and down the room making frightful faces.

"Doctor," said I, stepping before him.

"Go!" he cried, passing round me in a curve.

"I am going," I said, and I went.

But I halted at the door and looked back once more at the singular man, who had thrown himself again into his chair and was watching me angrily through his round spectacles.

"Doctor, you said to me once that you could not well carry more than four glasses, and this evening you have drunk six. So I will ascribe the unfriendly way in which you dismiss me--for what other reason I cannot imagine--to the fifth and sixth glass; and now good-by."

I left the room without his making any attempt to detain me, and as I closed the door behind me I heard him burst into a peal of shrill laughter.

"This comes from a man's not keeping within his measure," I said to myself, excusing him.

But as I reached the street below, and the frosty night air blew upon my heated face, I began to perceive that I had not exactly kept within my own measure. My gait as I traversed the empty, badly-lighted streets, now swept by a sharp December wind, was less steady than usual, and strange thoughts passed through my head, and I had curious fancies, whose origin could only be traced to the glasses I had emptied. And once I had to laugh aloud, for I imagined I heard the voice of the short, fat commerzienrath saying quite distinctly: "My dear son, we must mind what we are about or we shall not get home at all, and our Hermine will be alarmed."

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Chapter III

As the next day was Sunday, I had leisure to reflect upon the singular behavior of the doctor the evening before; but either the affair was in itself too complicated, or else my memory had suffered from the effects of my strong potations, and I could arrive at no satisfactory conclusion. That the strange man loved me much, after his fashion, I had innumerable proofs, and his anger on the previous evening had been rather that of an elder brother, who sees that the younger, whom he loves, is straying from the right way.

But what upon earth had I done amiss, then? It could not be possible that the doctor could seriously reproach me with my determination to make my own way in the world. He himself had trusted to his own resources very early in life, and with the toughest perseverance carried out his own plans.

Assuredly the fact that I had chosen the lot of a workman could be no crime in the eyes of a man whose heart beat so warmly for the poor, and who devoted his whole life to the relief of poverty and misery. The cause of his wrath must lie elsewhere; and after long pondering I came around to the point, that the picture of Paula's, upon which I figured as Richard the Lion-heart, had been the starting-point of our dispute. Had he taken it amiss that Paula held fast to her model? Did he grudge me the honor of being painted by her? Was he vexed that this picture was not in his possession, but in the hands of a man whom he so hated and despised as the commerzienrath? These were all questions worth considering. I concluded at last that my supposition must be correct, and resolved that this very day, before I called on Paula, I would have a look at the cause of our quarrel.

So about noon I set out for the academy, in the halls of which the great exhibition of paintings had been open now for some weeks. It was my first visit to an exhibition of the sort. My knowledge of pictures up to this time was restricted to a few old discolored saints in the churches of my native town, the engravings and family portraits in the superintendent's house, and the pictures which I had seen growing under Paula's hand. Still, as I had over and over contemplated and studied these few with never-ceasing delight, and had for years been witness of the development of a genuine artist nature, I had, perhaps, if no more, at least no less enthusiasm for beauty than the hundreds that flooded the exhibition-rooms. I cannot describe the feeling with which I, now following the throng, and now separated from it, wandered through the lofty rooms. I had never seen anything like this. I could not have conceived it possible. Were there then so many men who knew how to handle pencils and colors that the walls of this labyrinth of rooms were hung from ceiling to floor with the works of their skill? And was the world so gloriously rich? Was the sky that bent above the sunny bays of the South in truth of so marvellous a blue? Did snow-clad mountains really tower so majestically into the luminous ether? Was the twilight thus mysterious in the pine-fringed gorges of our own mountains? Did such infinite multitudes of birds indeed hover over the enormous rivers of Africa? Did the palaces of Italian cities rise thus gorgeously above the narrow canals along which black gondolas were noiselessly gliding? Were there halls in princely mansions whose marble floors thus clearly reflected the luxurious furniture and the forms of the guests? Yes; all these things that I here saw depicted really existed, and much more which my eager fancy added, half in dreaming. For the more I looked, examined, and admired, the stronger came over me a sense of having seen all this before; yes, seen so clearly that I could tell the artist what he had done well, and where he had fallen far short of the lovely reality. Often I felt really angry with a stupid painter who had seen so dimly, and so poorly represented what little he saw. In a word, in the briefest space of time I had become a finished connoisseur of the noble art of the painter, with the solitary drawback that I could in no case have told how the artist should go to work to make his picture better; but perhaps this was a special qualification for the office of critic.

I had probably wandered thus for an hour through the rooms, when stepping into one of the last, which was remarkably brightly lighted by a skylight, I started with sudden and extreme surprise. Looking over the heads of the crowd that filled the hall I seemed to see myself. And it was myself, or at least my counterfeit in Paula's picture, the picture which I had come on purpose to see, and which I looked for so far in vain. A particularly large group was collected before it, looking with eager and admiring eyes at Paula's work, while from many fair lips came the words, "Charming!" "how beautiful!" "what depth of feeling!" It was a queer sensation to me to see myself thus lying upon a bed, in a rich robe of fine linen, and scarcely concealed by a light drapery. The blood suffused my cheeks; I expected every instant to see the crowd turn from the picture to me to compare the copy with the original. But it was probably no easy thing to discover in the tall, healthy young man, in plain citizen's dress, standing back in a window niche, the original of the lion-hearted king, glorified by legend, in a picture on public exhibition. At all events no one made the discovery, and I was left to contemplate the painting at my leisure.

Now I observed for the first time that the picture was of far larger dimensions than the study which I knew. It was, in fact, a new picture, which had been completed since I last had seen Paula. So much the more wonderful, as it seemed to me, was the striking likeness to the original. Here were my curled reddish locks, my rather broad than high forehead, my large blue eyes, which found it so difficult to take an expression of anger. Even the feverish flush which lay upon the sunken cheeks of the royal Richard might at this moment have been seen upon those of the man in the window. In other respects the design remained the same, only the young knight who had the lineaments of Arthur had perhaps withdrawn a little more into the background, so that the broad-shouldered yeoman with the features of Sergeant Süssmilch came better into view. An admirable figure was the Arab physician, alias Doctor Willibrod Snellius, the most singular personage that could be imagined, in the garb of a dervish, and one whom one could not help liking, notwithstanding his ugliness, so that the generous confidence of the king became at once intelligible.

This then was the picture which Paula had painted and Hermine bought. Was there not here a two-fold reason for a little pride and even vanity? Must not the original be very firmly implanted in the artist's heart when she could make from recollection alone so true a likeness? Must not the original be somewhat interesting to the purchaser, when she was willing to pay such a price for the copy? These were foolish thoughts, and I can affirm that they vanished as soon as they arose, and the next moment I was heartily ashamed of them. Vexed with myself I aroused myself from my foolish dreaming and turned my gaze once more upon the picture, in front of which the eager crowd of gazers had increased.

Among the new spectators I noticed a lady in a rich and becoming toilette, leaning on the arm of a slender and rather foppishly dressed gentleman. The lady attracted my attention by her elegant figure and the vivacious manner in which she gesticulated with her little hand in its dainty kid glove, and spoke with great animation to her companion, who was evidently more interested by the spectators than by the picture itself. As her back was towards me I could only from time to time catch a glimpse of her face when she glanced over her shoulder at her companion. But the glimpse that I caught affected me powerfully, without my being able to explain the cause: a dark eye-brow, a fleeting glance from the corner of the eye, the contours of a brunette's cheek and of a rounded chin. Yet I could not turn my gaze from the lady. I even made one or two attempts to catch sight of her face, but she always turned it to the other side. The gentleman then seemed to propose that they should go: they were about leaving the room, when in the moment that they crossed the threshold the lady turned her head once more towards the picture, and I came very near uttering an exclamation of surprise? Was it not Constance?

"Did you see the Bellini?" a young officer near me asked an acquaintance who approached and accosted him.

"That lady with the gray-silk dress. Cashmere shawl, and jaunty hat? Is she the Bellini?"

"Yes, indeed. Is she not a charming creature?"

"Superb! And who was the gentleman with her? Baron Sandstrom, of the Swedish embassy?"

"Do you suppose he would let himself be seen here with the Bellini? What are you thinking of, baron? It was Lenz, the tenor of the Albert Theatre."

"The man that brought her on the stage?"

"The same. She has a wonderful talent, they say. Well, we shall see what there is in it."

"See? You would not go to the Albert Theatre, baron?"

"Why not, when a Bellini is in question?"

"You are a gay fellow, baron."

"I can return the compliment, if it is one."

And the two young men separated, laughing.

I breathed deeply. "Thank heaven!" I murmured. "Thank heaven that it was an actress and not Constance von Zehren. I would not meet her on the arm of such a fop and hear a pair of such fellows speak of her thus."

It did not, in the first moments of my surprise, occur to me that I had only to follow the lady in order to catch another look at her; and now, as I hastily traversed the rooms she was no longer to be seen. Again I breathed deeply, with a sensation of relief, when I had convinced myself of the inutility of further search, and said to myself: "It is better that I should not see this Fräulein Bellini again." And while I said this I felt my heart beat violently, and my eyes still wandered searching through the crowd. They were strange recollections which the face, at once known and unknown, of this lady, had awakened within me; recollections from a time in which the impressions once received remained forever.

These memories did not leave me until I traversed the long streets of the city, many of them new to me, on my way to Paula's residence, which I had the doctor carefully describe to me the previous day. Being Sunday, the shops and stores were closed, but the streets were still full of life. It was a clear, cold forenoon in the beginning of December. A little snow had fallen in the night, just enough to give a silvery glitter to the roofs and bring into handsome relief the projections and ornaments of the façades. Numerous pedestrians hastened along the streets; showy horses in handsome carriages pawed vigorously upon the frosty pavement, and even the wretched jades in the rickety droschkies trotted rather better than usual. The sight of this cheerful life scattered the evil dreams that had tried to master my soul, I felt myself so young and strong in the midst of a vast, powerful stream which drove me along but did not overpower me. All was new, fair, and rich; who could know to what glorious shores the current would bear me? And even now I saw a fair harbor and a beloved form beckoning to me, and I hastened my steps until I arrived, out of breath, at a large, handsome house in one of the most fashionable suburbs, and, on asking the porter if Frau von Zehren was at home, was shown up two flights of stairs.

"But the ladies are not at home," said the man.

"No one?"

"One of the young gentlemen may be."

"I will see."

"Can I take any message?"

"No; I wish to see them."

The porter closed his window, not without a sort of suspicious look at the tall stranger, who did not appear to be a gentleman of fashion, and I hurried up the two carpeted flights of stairs, and drawing a deep breath I pulled the bell over which was a brass plate with the name "Frau von Zehren," and under it "Paula von Zehren."

"Which of the boys shall I see?" I asked myself, and in fancy I saw the friendly faces of Benno, Kurt, and Oscar, at the door; but a step approached which could belong to neither of the boys. The door was opened and the old furrowed brown face of the sergeant looked at me inquisitively out of its clear blue eyes.

"Good day, sergeant."

The sergeant in his surprise very nearly let fall the bunch of brushes he had in his hand.

"Thunder and lightning, are we here at last? Won't the gnädige Frau and the young gentlemen be glad!--and the young lady too! Come in!"

And he pulled me in and closed the door behind us, and then led me into a room in which the furniture greeted me as old acquaintances.

The old man pressed my hands, exclaiming over and over:

"How splendid we are looking! I believe we are bigger than ever. And how we must have been working to make our hands so hard! We have had hard times, eh? But we have held up bravely, that is the main thing. How long since we got out of that cursed hole?"

Thus the sergeant questioned me, and pushed me into an easy-chair; and he was quite indignant when I told him that I had already been over two weeks in the city.

"It is not possible!" he cried. "Two weeks without coming to us, and we have been expecting you every day! It is not possible! It is enough to turn a man into a bear with seven senses!"

"Every one for himself first, old friend," I said. "Suppose I had come here first of all, and Fräulein Paula had asked what the tall George was going to do?"

The sergeant scratched his curly gray head. "To be sure, to be sure!" he said. "Self is the man. With a woman or a girl, of course, it is quite different; and so one had to bring them away at once that they might have some one to rely on on the way, and here, upon first moving in, some one to look after things; for women are women and men are men. Am I not right?"

"Doubtless, Süssmilch, doubtless. So you have been here, of course, ever since?"

"Of course," said the old man, who had taken a seat opposite to me, but sat upon the extreme edge of the chair, as if to show that he knew how to keep within the bounds himself had fixed. "And apart from other things, can they ever get on without my head?"

"And without your hands?"

"Not of so much consequence, though they come into play sometimes too," the old man replied, arranging the brushes between his fingers, "but the head" and he thoughtfully shook this interesting and important part of his person.

"I have just seen it at the exhibition," I said, a light suddenly flashing upon me in regard to the part the old man's head really played in the family arrangements.

"Does pretty well, don't it?" said the sergeant; "but the monk is better still."

"Who?"

"The monk. To be sure nobody knows what we are painting. But you must see it."

The old man sprang up with youthful alacrity and led me into a large and high apartment adjoining, which was Paula's studio. Sketches and designs of all kinds were hanging and leaning upon the walls, with heads, arms, and legs in plaster, a couple of sets of ancient armor, a lay figure draped with a long white mantle, and near the window, which reached to the ceiling, an easel with a picture from which the sergeant removed the covering.

"Here's the place to stand," he said. "Is not that splendid?"

"Splendid indeed!" I exclaimed.

"Was I not right that my head is quite another thing here?" said the old man, pointing proudly to the work. The scene was from Nathan the Wise, and represented the monk about to sound the intentions of the templar. Both figures stood out clear and plastic, with such animation in their looks that one might almost catch the words from their lips; the grand simplicity in the good weather-beaten face of the pious brother who had once been a squire, and had many a valiant lord and accomplished many a hard service, none of which had ever been so hard to him as this commission of the patriarch. On the other side the templar, young and slender, his head thrown defiantly back, his lips compressed with an expression of discontent, and his blue eyes bent upon the poor monk. In the middle distance a portion of Nathan's house, and the palms that surround the Holy Tomb; behind these the domes and slender minarets of Jerusalem, with the haughty crescent sharply defined against the southern sky, where the eye lost itself with delight in the immeasurable distance.

"The young gentleman has something from us; here, for instance, and here," said the sergeant, pointing with his finger at the eyes and mouth of the templar, and then looking again at me; "but I said at once that it is not so good as King Richard; by far not so good," and the old man shook his head gravely.

"But the Fräulein cannot paint me always," I said; "that would at last become too monotonous. With you it is different: such a head as yours is not to be met with again."

"Yes," said the sergeant. "It is curious: one never believed it; in fact one hardly knew he had a head; but that's the way they all talk that come here, and they want me in all their studios; and Fräulein Paula did lend me once or twice, but in the other pictures one looks like a bear with seven senses, and don't know himself again."

"And how is she?" I asked.

"Oh, well enough, if we did not have to work so much; but from morning, as soon as it is light enough, until evening when it is too dark to tell one color from another, working here in the studio, or copying in the museum--no bear could stand it, let alone such a good young lady who has not yet got over her father's death, and secretly weeps for it every day. It is a real pity."

The old man turned away, laid the brushes in the box, and passed the back of his hand quickly over his eyes.

I stood with folded arms before the picture, which no longer pleased me when I thought that she worked on it unresting from morning till night, while grief for the loss of her beloved father still dimmed her eyes. It would be a great thing to have fifty thousand thalers and be able to say: "You shall not have so hard a life of it; you shall not lose your beautiful eyes like your poor mother."

"How is Frau von Zehren?" I asked.

"Well enough in health," answered the sergeant, moving back the easel; "but she has scarcely a glimpse of light; and the doctor, who ought to know best, told her, when she asked him, that there was no hope that she would ever see again."

"And Benno and the others?"

A bright gleam passed over the old man's brown face,

"Ah," said he, "there we have our pleasure, and with each one more than the other, Benno has been a student now for a month, and Kurt will soon enter. Yes, we are happy in these. And our youngster too! He is going to be a painter, and has begun of course upon my head, and not done so badly for his fifteen years. Look for yourself, if it is not----"

At this moment there was a ring at the door. The old man stepped to the window and looked out.

"I thought it was they. You see we all went out walking, because the day is so fine; but it is too soon yet for them to be back; it must be some one else; I will see;" and the old man put back the drawing-board on which Oscar had sketched his first head from the life, and left me alone in the studio.

I heard a voice in the passage which I thought I recognized as Paula's, and then the door opened, and Paula entered.

At first she did not observe me, and I saw at a glance that the sergeant had said nothing of my arrival. Advancing quickly she looked eagerly at the covered picture on the easel. The fresh air of the winter day had reddened her cheeks, her lips were slightly parted. I had never seen her so fair, nor could I have believed it possible. Suddenly she perceived me; she stopped, gazed at me with fixed eyes and a frightened look. "Paula," I said, hastily coming forward, "dear Paula, it is really I."

"Dear George!"

She stood before me, and I took both her hands, while she looked at me, smiling and blushing.

"Thank heaven, George, that you are here at last. I have had no quiet hour since I knew that you were free again, and on the way here: I could not imagine where you were staying; I even feared something had happened to you. What have you been doing, and what adventures have you had, you bad boy? I know of one already, and that from the fairest mouth in the world."

Paula had seated herself upon a low chair near the picture, and looked up to me with smiling eyes.

"You need not be so confused," she said, mischievously.

"With a sister, you know, it makes no matter. I am in the exclusive possession of all Benno's tender secrets, and lately Kurt has honored me with his confidence. He is smitten with the twelve-year-old daughter of the geheimrath who has recently moved into the rooms below, and vows that Raphael never painted such a head. Why should I not be your confidante also, especially since you are my eldest brother--or are you not?"

I was surprised to hear Paula, who usually weighed every word, chattering after this fashion. A great change must have taken place in her since we had parted. It was no longer the Paula who in the shade of the high prison walls had developed under my eyes from a child to a maiden, and whom I thought I knew as I knew myself. What had loosened her tongue in this way? And whence had she the free carriage which I so much admired in her, as she now sat in a graceful posture in the low chair, while a beam of sunlight touched her head which seemed surrounded with an aureola?

"But you don't answer me," she resumed; "and really you have no cause to be ashamed of what you have done. Hermine says that without you the boat would have been lost, and probably the ship also. You may judge how proud I was when I heard it. And what do you think was my first thought?--that my father could have heard it too."

Paula's large eyes filled with tears, but she quickly suppressed her emotion and said:

"Yes, I was proud of you, and happy in the thought that you should commence life with such a noble deed, a deed worthy of yourself. And now you must tell me what you have been doing all this time, and you must expect to pay the penalty if I am not entirely satisfied with you. Sit here in this chair. We have a quarter of an hour yet before my mother and the boys come back. An idea about the picture there had come into my mind, but it is better so."

I gave the dear girl an exact account of all that had happened to me since my discharge. She listened with the closest attention, and only once smiled when I took pains to prove that I should have entered the machine-works in any event, and that the fact that the commerzienrath was my employer was far from agreeable to me.

"But neither the commerzienrath nor Hermine know anything about it."

"No," I answered; "and that is one comfort."

"Which will not last long, for they will soon learn it."

"From whom will they learn it?"

"From me, for one. Hermine has adjured me by sun, moon, and stars, to give her notice of the runaway as soon as he is found; and the tears were standing in her beautiful eyes, and Fräulein Duff laid her hand upon her shoulder and said, 'Seek faithfully, and thou wilt find!' I can assure you, George, it was a moving scene."

Paula smiled, but so kindly that her banter, if she was bantering me, did not wound me. On the contrary I was thankful to her, very thankful. I had considered over and over how I should tell her of my strange meeting with Hermine without embarrassment, and now under her kindly hands all was smooth and straight, which my clumsy fingers would have hopelessly entangled. I was grateful to her--very grateful.

And now Paula told me of Hermine, and how amiable and good she had been to her, and had spent the three days she had stayed in Berlin almost exclusively in her company, and had at once fallen in love with the picture at the exhibition--here Paula smiled again very slightly--and could not reconcile herself to leaving it, after she had bought it, for a whole month at the exhibition. She further related how the notice which Richard the Lion-heart had excited had already brought her new commissions, and that her Monk and Templar was already sold for a handsome sum to a Jewish banker; and how her studio had since been visited by very distinguished persons, indeed more frequently than was agreeable, and she had had to lock up her portfolios of sketches because they began unaccountably to disappear.

"You can judge," she went on, "how inexpressibly happy all this makes me. Not that I think myself entitled to be proud--I think that I well know my defects and how great they are--but it is a sweet consolation to me to be at ease about the future of my mother and brothers, and that the boys can now go boldly forward in the paths they have chosen, without being compelled anxiously to consider every step--all the boys, from the youngest to the oldest, is it not so, George?--from the youngest to the oldest."

She looked full into my eyes, and I very well understood what she meant.

"I do not anxiously consider every step, Paula," I said. "I know that I am in the right path; why should I then be anxious?"

"I have boundless confidence in you," replied Paula; "both in your clear-sightedness and your energy. I know that you will make your way; but one can make his way with greater or with less labor, and in longer or in shorter time; and your sister desires that her brother, who has been so cruelly cheated of so many years of his life, may lose no moment, and may encounter no obstacle which his sister can remove from his path."

"I thank you, Paula," I said; "from the whole depth of my soul I thank you; but you will not be angry with me for trusting that the hour may never come when you will have to work for me; for that I may ever be able to care for you and yours--this, my clearest hope and most cherished desire, I see that I must now renounce."

"How can you speak so?" said Paula, gently shaking her beautiful head. "True, I deserve it for my own wilfulness. You must consider me a foolish girl who allows herself to be dazzled by the false glitter of success. But believe me, it is not so. I know very well that I may be let fall just as quickly as I have been lifted, far above my desert. And then I may fall sick, or my invention may fail me: I cannot go on forever painting you and old Süssmilch; and a girl has so little opportunity to make well-grounded studies, and to extend the narrow circle of her experience. And then what would become of the boys, of me, of all of us, if we had not our eldest to look to?"

"You are jesting with me now, Paula."

"Indeed I am not," she said, earnestly. "I have only too often felt how my powers are no longer sufficient for my brothers, and that young men need to be guided by a man, and not by a woman, who does not know where the limit lies to which a youth may go, nay, must go, if he is to become anything. Good friend as the doctor is, I cannot rely on him in this point, for he is an eccentric, and an eccentric is no fitting model for a young man. For this reason I have been all the time wishing for you. You know the boys so well, and they are so fond of you. I know no one to whom I would so willingly intrust them."

"But, Paula, a workman in a machine-shop, a mere common journeyman blacksmith, is no pattern for students and young artists."

"You will not--yes, you will always be a workman, but not always a journeyman: you will become a master, a great master in your craft. And the day is no longer distant; at least it is much nearer than you think. You do not know your own worth."

Paula said this with a slightly elevated voice, and with flashing eyes. I was so in the habit of giving full confidence to her words, and it had so prophetic a sound, that I did not venture to express the slight doubt that arose in my mind as to its fulfilment.

At this moment came a ring at the bell. "It is my mother and the boys," Paula said hurriedly and softly.

"They do not know that you have been two weeks at liberty; my mother could not comprehend how you could let so long a time elapse without coming to see us, after you had once reached the city. You must not let her know that it has been so long."

At this they came rushing in at the door: Oscar, my favorite, Kurt, my second favorite, and Benno, who had always been my third favorite, who came with his mother on his arm; and there was rejoicing, and shaking hands, and kisses, and exultations, and perhaps some tears, though I am not sure. Of course I must spend the day with them. And in the evening nothing could keep them from seeing me home, that they might bring their sister word where and how I was living: and then I went back with them a piece of the way until they were out of the workmen's quarter, and in a part of the town which they knew better; and when I returned it was very late, and I fell asleep at once and had a long dream about the picture which Paula had painted, and Hermine had bought, and the fair Bellini, who resembled Constance von Zehren, had so much admired.

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Chapter IV

To be sure, if I had any fancy at this time for indulging in dreaming, I had to do it at night, for by day I had no leisure for such vagaries. By day I was taken possession of by work--hard jealous work, that kept me busy from the early morning to late at night--now thrusting the heavy hammer into my hand and giving me a mass of iron to conquer, and then placing in my fingers the pen with which I covered page after page with long rows of figures and complicated formulas. Altogether it was a pleasant time, and even now I think of it with pleasure tempered with sadness. In our memory the brightest light always lies upon those periods of our lives in which we have striven forward most eagerly, and I was now, in all senses, a striver, and there was no day in which I did not mount at least one round of the steep ladder. Now it was some bit of technical dexterity that I caught from my fellow-workmen; now a new formula which I had calculated myself; and at all times the delightful sensation of rising, of progressing, of increasing powers, the joyous consciousness that a far heavier burden might lie upon my shoulders without danger of my sinking under it. It was a happy, a delightful time; and whenever I think of it, it is as if the perfume of violets and roses were floating around me, and as if then the days must all have been days of spring.

And yet it was not spring, but a rough severe winter, in which the icy sky lay gray and heavy above the snow-piled roofs and the filthy factory-yards, while the sparrows fluttered about all day, seeking in vain for food, and at night the famishing crows expressed their sufferings in incessant cawing; and day by day we saw pale, hollowed-eyed, ragged figures, in ever-increasing numbers, wandering in the stormy streets, or crouching at night in the dim light of the lamps upon the steps of the houses, or where any projecting masonry offered them a little shelter.

I now walked the streets more frequently, for, notwithstanding the distance at which my friends lived, no week passed in which I did not spend at least one evening with them. Then Benno, who was now studying chemistry and physics, and had occasion to repair some deficiencies in his mathematics, came twice a week to my room to work with me, and I then accompanied him back half the way, and sometimes the whole distance. It had been discussed whether I had not better take another lodging, nearer to them; but Paula decided that it was best for me to live where my work was; and one Sunday forenoon she came with her brothers to pay me a visit, and convince me that I by no means lived entirely out of her reach, as I had maintained. She pronounced my inhabiting the lonely ruinous court of the machine-works, which her hope looked to in the future, perfectly absurd; and the fitting-up of my room with the old worm-eaten rococo furniture of the previous century a crackbrained fancy; but she observed it all with the warmest interest, and did not conceal that she was touched by the sight of the terra-cotta vases on the mantel-piece, and the copy of the Sistine Madonna on the walk.

"Stay here," she finally said; "not because this lodging is convenient for you, and is really original enough; nor because the fitting-up does honor to your taste, wanting only a set of curtains, which I will make for you, and a piece of carpet by your writing-table, which I undertake to provide; for these are trifles. What determines my opinion is the feeling that you belong here; that this place belongs to you already, as if like a conqueror you had taken possession of this desolate province, and planted your standard first of all. The rest will surely follow. I fancy that I see these heaps of stone already growing up into stately buildings, the fire leaping from the tall chimneys, and these vacant courts alive with busy workmen; this house changed to a handsome villa, and you ruling and directing the whole as master and owner. Stay here, George; the place will bring you good fortune."

Words like these, from Paula's lips, had for me the force of irresistible conviction, as the words of a consecrated priestess might have for her trusting worshippers. Not that I always cheerfully and willingly acquiesced in her views; it would have been, for example, far more pleasant to me if Paula had said: "Your lodging is very well situated for your purposes, it is true; but I would rather have you nearer to me; I see you now once a week, and I could then see you twice, or perhaps every day." And then I upbraided myself that I did not value Paula's desire to advise me always for the best, higher than all else; but still I could not help wishing that this advice, however good, had not seemed quite so easy for her to give.

When I was thus brought to reflect upon my relations with Paula it could not escape even my inexperience that these relations were different from what they used to be. One circumstance especially proved this fact. The boys and I had from the first used to each other the familiar "thou;" but between Paula and myself the formal "you" had never been laid aside, not even in those trying days after the death of her father, when we had hand-in-hand to face the storm which had burst over us all. Even then, when our hearts were moved to their lowest depths, and our tears were mingled, the brotherly "thou" had never risen to our lips. And now she used it to me from the very moment of our meeting. The evening before I would have deemed it impossible; now, that it was really so, I could scarcely believe it. Did I feel that the very thing which made our intercourse easy and unrestrained was at the same time a strong fetter with which Paula bound my hands? Was it with that intention or, not? I did not know nor hope ever to know.

Of course I did not go about tormenting myself with this enigma. Guessing riddles was a kind of work in which I had no skill, so for the most part I enjoyed unalloyed the happiness which the friendship of this noble-hearted girl, and of her amiable family afforded me. Every moment spent in their society was precious to me, nor could I anywhere have found more purifying and ennobling influences.

I do not recall a single instance of the slightest misunderstanding occurring between the members of this family, or even of one raising the voice in momentary irritation. In affectionate devotion to their mother, in chivalrously tender love for their sister, the brothers were literally one heart and one soul; and if even a shadow of misunderstanding threatened to fall between them, one word of Paula's, yes, often a mere glance from her loving eyes, sufficed to banish it. Now as ever was Paula the good genius of the family, the honored priestess to whose keeping was committed the sacred flame of the hearth, the helper, the comforter, the adviser to whom each turned when he needed aid, consolation or counsel. And with what maidenly grace she wore this priestly crown! Who that did not know her could have divined that this delicate creature was not only the moral support of the whole family, but that this small, slender, diligent hand also provided their daily bread? Yet this was the fact: indeed it could hardly now be doubted that she would soon be able to raise her family to a comparatively brilliant position. Her Monk and Templar had been purchased by one of the wealthiest bankers at an unusually high price, and there was already another picture upon her easel which had been bought at an even higher price before it was begun.

A picture-dealer--not the one who used to buy at a trifling price those pictures of Paula's which he afterwards sold to Doctor Snellius for handsome sums, but one of the first in the city, came to Paula and asked if she could paint a hunting piece. Just at that time there was a run on hunting-pieces: Prince Philip Francis had brought them into fashion, and the nobility had run mad about them, so the Jewish bankers naturally began to take an interest in hares and foxes. Paula answered that she had not yet painted a picture of this kind, and did not feel warranted to undertake the commission; but the dealer was so importunate, and the price he offered so high--"what do you think of it?" Paula asked me. "Do you think I can do it?"

"How can you doubt it?" I replied. "The landscape and the figures will give you no trouble, and as for the technical part, I can help you, if you have any difficulty with it."

"You have told me so many things about your hunter's life with Uncle Malte," said Paula, "and one scene has especially fixed itself in my memory. It was in the earlier time of your stay at Zehrendorf, and you were sitting at breakfast with my uncle on the heath, in the shadow of a tree which grew on the edge of a hollow; my uncle was enjoying the repose of the bivouac, when suddenly a hare came in sight on the edge of the mound. Flinging bottle and glass away, you seized your gun, when the hare turned out to be a lean old wether grazing on the heath. Would not that make a picture!"

"You might try it at all events," I said.

She tried it, and the attempt, as I had never doubted, succeeded capitally. Even one who took no interest in the somewhat humorous character of the incident must at least have been captivated by the beauty of the landscape. The autumnal sunlight on the brown heath, to the left the white dunes between which here and there glistened the blue sea,--all this was painted with a delicious freshness that one felt invigorated even by looking at it. And the little scene which comprised the action of the picture was so clearly rendered that no one could fail to understand it--the elder hunter, lying in the grassy bank with his hand under his head, only taking the short pipe from his mouth to laugh at his companion, who with flashing eyes and in the greatest excitement has half-risen to his knee, and a few paces off the silly sheep's face looking over the heath, and saluting his over-hasty friend with a bleat of insulting confidence;--it was enough to bring a smile upon the face of the gloomiest hypochondriac. Naturally the elder hunter gradually assumed the features of the Wild Zehren, and the young novice day by day grew into a likeness of me.

"I ought not, really, to have introduced you again into one of my pictures," said Paula, "for two reasons: first, that you may not grow vain, and secondly that people may not think me barren of all invention. But in fact I cannot picture the scene to myself without you, any more than I can without my poor uncle; and I fear if I were to leave you both out the picture would be a poor one. You must give me one or two of your Sunday mornings. Of course I know your face well enough, and could paint it, I think, with any expression; but the action of a person throwing down a glass with his left hand, and reaching for his gun with his right, half-raised on his right knee while the left is still extended, is too complicated for me to paint without a model."

Thus it came that for several successive Sunday mornings I spent delightful hours in Paula's studio. The time never seemed long to us. I had so frequently gone over the ground of Paula's landscape that I could describe to her every bush, every tuft of grass, every peculiarity of the surface, and every effect of light upon the sandy dunes or the bushy heath. And while I was able thus to be really of use to the dear girl, it was a sweet reward to me to hear from her own lips that, if the picture turned out a good one, as she almost believed it would, it was in great measure owing to me. Then we had so many things to talk about: my progress in my trade, my increasing knowledge of the steam-engine, were topics of which Paula could never hear enough. Or else the question was discussed whether Kurt, who was now in his sixteenth year, ought to remain longer at school, or commence learning his trade, and if Streber's works were the right place, and Klaus, who was now a master-workman, the right master for this richly-gifted pupil. This led us again to speak of Klaus, what a good-natured and excellent fellow he was, and of Christel, whether any one would respond to her inquiry in the Dutch newspapers, and if so, whether this some one would be a Javanese aunt, as Klaus and Christel firmly maintained, or a Sumatran uncle.

So we were chatting together one morning, Paula at her easel, while I was pacing backwards and forwards at the farther end of the room, with my hands behind my back. The winter sun shown so brightly that the light had to be lessened at the high window near which the easel stood, while at the others it streamed brilliantly in, in clustering beams in which the motes were dancing. Frau von Zehren was out walking with her sons. A Sabbath stillness pervaded the house, and when Paula ceased speaking I felt like Uhland's shepherd, who "alone upon a wide plain hears the morning bell, and then all is silent, near and far."

Suddenly the hall-bell rang.

"I had hoped we should not be troubled with any visitors to-day," I said with some annoyance.

"Eminence must pay its penalty," said Paula, jestingly. "Let us only hope they will not stay too long."

At this moment the girl opened the door. I stopped my walk, and stood, stark with amazement, in the background, as I saw two gentlemen enter, one of whom was Arthur von Zehren, while the other, whom with a polite bow he had motioned to precede him, awakened in me some faint recollection which I could not precisely define.

"I have the honor," said Arthur, after apologizing to his cousin, with that grace of manner that always belonged to him, for not having called upon her immediately after his return--"I have the honor to present to you Count Ralow, whose acquaintance I was so fortunate as to make in London, and who is a great connoisseur, and an equally great admirer of your talents."

"My friend has not described me quite correctly," said the count, bowing respectfully to Paula. "I am by no means a great connoisseur; but he is quite right in calling me a great admirer of your talents. I have seen your picture at the exhibition, and been charmed with it, like all the world; and as your cousin was presumptuous enough to offer to present me to you, I could not forego a piece of such singular good fortune."

The young man, whose glance now fell for the first time upon the picture, suddenly started back, but rather with the gesture of one who is unpleasantly startled than of one who is agreeably surprised. And well might he be startled, when he suddenly recognized in the hunter by the willow-tree the Wild Zehren, the man who had only needed an opportunity to bathe his hands in the blood that flowed in the veins of Prince Karl of Prora-Wiek.

It had been now eight years since I had seen him, and in my whole life I had only seen him twice: once in the dim light of an autumn afternoon as he flew by me at a rapid gallop, and the second time in the dark forest by the glimmering moonlight; but the slender figure and the pale, refined face had impressed themselves indelibly upon my memory.

"Beautiful!" said the prince. "Admirable! superb! This sunlight, this heath--I know all this--know it perfectly. I tell you, Zehren, even to the minutest details it is nature itself! Is it not?"

Arthur did not answer, for if the confusion of the prince at the first sight of the picture had surprised him, he entirely lost his presence of mind when he caught sight of me in the background, where I had been standing motionless the whole time. I think there were few men whom Arthur von Zehren would not have preferred to meet in his cousin's studio just then.

"Is it not so, Zehren?" the prince repeated, rather impatiently.

"Certainly; it is perfectly superb: I said so before," replied Arthur, evidently in doubt whether it would not be best to overlook me altogether.

But as his hesitation did not prevent him from casting uneasy glances at me, which caused the eyes of the prince to turn in the same direction, the result was that the latter perceived, at the end of the studio, a tall, broad-shouldered, plainly-dressed young man, with curly blond beard and hair, whom he had already seen in the character of King Richard in the picture at the exhibition, and now again saw in the hunting-piece on the easel. Whom could he suppose that he had before him but one of those persons who go from studio to studio, now as a model for Joseph, and now for Pharaoh? And though it is probable that the prince was by no means addicted to minute observation of models in artists' studios, at this moment any opportunity of diverting attention from the unlucky picture was too welcome not to be seized at once.

"Ah! here is our original for King What's-his-name! A splendid fellow, whom I should like to see in the regiment of my cousin, Count Schlachtensee; don't you say so, Zehren?"

The unlucky Arthur's part of second-fiddle was a hard one to play to-day. But it was impossible for him, now that I had been brought directly into the conversation, to pretend, not to know his old schoolmate, apart from the fact that Paula would hardly have forgiven such a piece of insolence; and he perceived, moreover, by my looks that I was malicious enough to enjoy his confusion. Indeed I fear that I even indulged in a smile whose significance could not escape him, so he had no alternative--it was highly exasperating, but he really had no other--but to turn to me with as pleasant a smile as he could force to his whitened lips, and while toying with his eyeglass, so as to have no hand free to offer me, to accost me in an affectedly condescending tone:

"Ah! see there! are we at last out of the--ahem--again? Congratulate you--congratulate you with all my heart--upon my honor--ahem!"

The young prince's looks grew by no means brighter during this singular salutation of his second. The expression of my face, which he now observed more closely, and Arthur's evident embarrassment, showed that there was something wrong here; and at this moment he happened to catch a glance exchanged between Paula and myself, which probably seemed another mesh in the net which was here being drawn over his princely head. But now it seemed to Paula high time to interpose and put an end to this singular scene.

"You would have sooner had the pleasure," she said, turning to Arthur, "of meeting your old schoolmate, if you had found your way to our house earlier during the fortnight that you have been here; George has been in the city three months. This gentleman"--she went on, turning to the prince--"is my oldest and dearest friend, who stood faithfully by me at a time of great trial, and who now devotes a few hours of his valuable time to aid my imperfect invention with his advice. I esteem it an honor to introduce to you Herr George Hartwig."

At hearing my name the prince changed color and bit his lip, though he made a great effort to accost the lady's oldest and dearest friend with a polite phrase. Doubtless he had heard my name too often from Constance and others, and the associations connected with it were of too peculiar a character for more amusing and more agreeable experiences to obliterate it entirely, even from the defective memory of the young prince. A dim recollection of a tall figure before which he had once crouched in a dark forest--and then the circumstance that this man with the broad shoulders and the memorable name stood by the side of the Wild Zehren in the picture by the hand of Paula von Zehren,--all this suddenly fitted into one combination. The prince had to find the meaning of it all, however pleasant it might have been to have been spared the whole riddle.

Just at this disagreeable moment, that is to say just at the right time, the Prince of Prora-Wiek remembered what he owed to himself. The signs of embarrassment vanished from his face and his manner; he looked calmly at the picture and at me, comparing the copy with the original, and said a number of pretty things to Paula, which, if not quite well considered, and possibly not even well meant, sounded as if they were both. He hastily glanced at the drawings on the walls, and turned over the sketches in an open portfolio, declared that the light in the studio was admirable, and the whole arrangement exquisitely original and poetic, then remembered that he had been summoned to an audience of the princess, for which he would be too late if he did not take his leave at once, and went off with his companion.

In half a minute we heard the prince's coupé, which had been standing at the door, drive off, and we looked at each other and laughed, laughed with great apparent enjoyment, and then suddenly became grave.

"This is the great annoyance of our calling," said Paula. "Inquisitive visitors cannot be refused admission; indeed we are expected to be highly gratified if they come, and then chatter everywhere about our skill and the subject of our last picture. But, as I said, it is an annoyance at best; and Arthur might have been more considerate than to present himself in this fashion after staying away so long. His only apology is that he meant kindly, and thought he was bringing me a distinguished and wealthy patron. Certainly, if one may judge by the exterior, this Count Ralow must be both very distinguished and very rich."

"The inference is correct this time, at all events," I said; "and if you want the proof--it was the young Prince Prora."

"Impossible!" said Paula.

"I am sure of it," I replied. "I have seen in the papers that the prince has lately visited England, where Arthur says he made the acquaintance of this Count Ralow. But I should have recognized him without that; and besides, I now remember that the Princes of Prora are also Counts von Ralow."

"I am glad to hear it," said Paula, "though I should have preferred to make the acquaintance of the prince under his proper title."

"I consider this incognito a piece of rudeness. Why can he not call upon you as he does upon the princess? But the real impertinence lies in his coming here at all. The former lover of Constance had no business to present himself to Constance's cousin. I felt all this strongly enough at the time, Paula; but I also felt that your house and your apartment were not the place to discuss these matters."

"I thank you for your considerateness," said Paula, taking my hand in hers. "I saw in your eyes that you were placing a restraint upon yourself about something. Men best prove their respect for women when they do not suffer any storms of this kind to break loose in their presence; and as to this matter, I beg of you to dismiss it from your thoughts. You have suffered far too much from it already; it is time you had rid yourself of it once for all."

"Yes, if that were only possible," I said; and then I told Paula, what I had never mentioned to her before, about my meeting at the exhibition with the beautiful Bellini, who had so striking a resemblance to Constance. "I have certainly no reason to cherish any love for Constance," I said; "on the contrary, I can meet her seducer without the slightest feeling of hatred or revenge; and yet the image of that beautiful woman follows me everywhere, and it could not be otherwise had I seen Constance herself. Now why is this?"

"Constance was your first love," Paula answered, "and that makes a difference with men."

"With men, Paula? Do you mean that with women it is otherwise?"

"I do mean that," she replied. "A woman's first love differs from a man's, and exceeds it. Exceeds it in proportion as a man is more to a woman than a woman to a man."

"What kind of new philosophy do you call that?"

"It is no new philosophy: at least it is as old as my thoughts upon these matters, which is no very great age, it is true."

A faint flush tinged her usually pale cheeks, but it seemed that altogether she was not displeased that we had fallen upon this theme, and she continued with some animation:

"A man's life is more full of change, richer in deeds and events, than a woman's; and for this reason individual impressions, even the strongest, do not remain so long with them. They have so many new and more important things to record on the tablet of their life that they are obliged from time to time to efface the old writing with the sponge of forgetfulness. With us women it is altogether different: we do not willingly efface a word which sounds sweetly to our ears, much less a line, much less a whole page of our poor life. And then even when a man has an unusually tenacious memory, he can not act and choose as he will: the stronger and manlier his nature, the more does he act and choose as he must. And he must choose suitably to his age and circumstances--to use another phrase, suitably to his development. The man of twenty-five differs from the youth of nineteen far otherwise than the woman of twenty-five differs from the girl of nineteen; and the man of thirty-five again is another man. If the man of twenty-five or thirty-five should make the same choice as the youth of nineteen--I mean such a choice as youth makes, romantically unselfish and inconsiderate--he would commit a folly, in my eyes at least."

"How did you come to be so selfish and practical, Paula?" I inquired, in laughing astonishment.

"One grows so, I suppose," she said, taking up palette and brushes, and beginning to work.

"It may be as you say," I said, "when one, as has been your case, passes through a marked process of development; so that the laws which you have just laid down as governing us men are very possibly applicable to yourself. I knew you when you were but fifteen, and you were then a beginner in your art; now, at two-and-twenty, you are an artist, and at five-and-twenty you will be a distinguished one. In your case it is intelligible enough that the Paula of to-day has no longer those romantic illusions--to the future Paula, alas, I cannot venture to raise my thoughts."

"You are jesting, and cruelly too," she said; "and your good face has not the expression that I could wish it to wear at this moment."

"I do not jest at all," I answered emphatically. "I perfectly understand that your claims upon life must rise higher with every year--I might say with every picture you produce."

"Are you really speaking in earnest?"

"Perfectly so; do you not wish to become a great artist?"

"Assuredly," she replied; "but is that within a woman's power? How many out of the hundreds and thousands of inspired girls and women who have turned to the easel or the desk have become great artists? Upon the stage they may; but I have often questioned whether the dramatic art be a true art, or rather a half-art, in which half-talents can reach the highest eminence. And those who are called actors of genius, what are they in comparison with men of true genius in art, in literature, in music? As far beneath them as I am beneath Raphael. And what have I produced so far? Two or three passable heads; a striking scene or so, which I took directly from the life; recollections from books; Richard C[oe]ur de Lion, the Monk--where in these is an original invention, a single trace of real genius? And what is this picture here? What have I done towards it? Little more than mix the colors; the rest is all of your invention. You told me how the sunlight falls in the sandy dunes, how the wind waves the heads of the heath-flowers; you----"

"But Paula, Paula, you talk as if I were painting your picture, and as if you could paint no picture without me."

"And I have painted none without you: there you see my miserable poverty."

I could not see with what expression she pronounced these words, for she had bent her face down to her easel.

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Chapter V

Since her success at the exhibition Paula had been overwhelmed with invitations, and she had accepted one for this day from the banker Solomon, the purchaser of the Monk and Templar. So I was left with Frau von Zehren and her sons. Yet Paula was present with us all, and with none more than her poor mother who was bereft of the pleasure of seeing her daughter's works.

"But all that she has she has from you, mother," said Benno; "and she knows that herself better than any of us."

"Then she has it from her grandfather," said Frau von Zehren. "He was really a great artist: what I might have done I cannot say. Unfortunately it was never granted me to develop the talent that I had; but how can I say unfortunately? If it is true, as you say, that Paula's talent is mine, then her success is my success, and thus I perform the miracle of becoming a great painter with blind eyes."

A gentle smile played about the refined lips of the still beautiful woman, and as shortly afterwards I retraced my steps homewards through the dark streets her face continually recurred to my memory. She must in her youth have been even more beautiful than Paula, though Paula's beauty had wonderfully increased. How superbly indignation and shame contended in her features as that coxcomb of a prince strutted about her studio without the slightest idea of how impertinent he was, and probably fancying all the time that he was making himself unspeakably agreeable.

This meeting with the prince who had been my favored rival with Constance, and with Arthur, whom I had so long believed to be the favored lover of Paula, gave me much matter for reflection, more indeed than was advantageous for the progress of my work, to which I had applied myself on my arrival home. As I recalled the refined and handsome but sadly worn face of the young prince, his eyes now vacant, now burning with unnatural fire, the twitchings of his brow and cheeks, his manner, at once insinuating and supercilious, I felt more and more indignant that Arthur should have dared to introduce such a man into Paula's house. What, at best, could be his motive for seeking the introduction? The gratification of ordinary curiosity. And at worst? I ground my teeth to think of the horrible possibility. My only consolation was that my fear that Arthur might have won, or yet win, Paula's affections, now appeared in all its absurdity. Clearly such a fop as he could never be dangerous to such a girl as Paula; though fop as he was, he was wonderfully handsome, the perfect model of an elegant gentleman in irreproachable kid gloves and varnished boots; a little vacant, perhaps, about the mouth, adorned with a slight black beard, and a little hollow under the large dark eyes that had lost all their brilliancy. It is possible that for certain women this rendered him all the more dangerous; but what had Paula in common with such?

Then my thoughts wandered from the prince, whom I had seen again so unexpectedly, to the fair Bellini who so singularly resembled Constance; and I pushed back my chair, stepped to the window, which Paula's kindness had furnished with dark curtains, and leaning my heated brow against the glass looked out, in dreary musing, into the yard, across which I observed a figure coming through the freshly-fallen snow, directly to the house. My thoughts involuntarily recurred to the figure I had once seen stealing by moonlight across the lawn to Constance's window. Was it the prince? What brought him to me? The figure came to the stair that led up from the yard, and began to ascend the steps. I took the lamp from the table to give light to the visitor, whoever he might be. As I opened the door of my room he was just entering the house, and the light of my lamp fell brightly on the face of Arthur von Zehren.

"Thank heaven that I have found you at last, and without breaking my legs or my neck!" he cried upon seeing me. "How can any man in his senses live in such a place? But you always were an original. And really you seem comfortably fixed for a machinist, or whatever it was that the fellow at the gate called you,"--and Arthur, who had entered the room as he spoke, threw himself into the arm-chair which I had pushed near the fireplace, and held his gloved hands over the coals.

I remained standing by the fire, and said: "What procures me the pleasure of seeing you for the second time today?"

"The pleasure does not seem to be overwhelming, to judge from your tone; and in fact I should scarcely have come had not the prince--I mean to say, had not I--what was I going to say? oh, yes--had a bit of business to settle with you. While you were--you know where--you were several times so obliging as to help me out of some small difficulties. I took exact note of it all, for a man who owes as many people as I do must be particular in these matters to keep his creditors from swindling him. Of course I had nothing of the sort to fear from you; but out of mere habit I took a note of it, and this is the amount, without the interest, which I cannot calculate, and therefore would rather leave off--a hundred and sixty thalers. I happen to be in funds just now, and it is a pleasure to me to acquit myself of my debt to you."

And rising from his chair he counted down a pile of treasury-notes on the table.

"Will you count them over?" he continued; "I have just come from a dinner where we had famous champagne, and a charming little game afterwards; and it is quite possible that I may have miscounted them."

He looked at me with a smile that was meant to be sly, and balanced himself unsteadily on his toes and heels: it was too evident that he had come from a dinner at which the champagne had not been spared.

"What I was going to say," he went on--"your lamp burns so dim that one can hardly collect his ideas--going to say, was this: it was with the very best motive that he sent me here. He is the noblest fellow living--heart and purse--all genuine gold, as long as he has any. So you need not have any scruple, old fellow. And I was going to say--oh, in what relation did you ever stand to the prince? He told me himself that he was under an obligation to you; but what it can be is a mysterious enigma to me--a mysterious enigma," he repeated, leaning back in the arm-chair into which he had thrown himself again, and warming his feet alternately at the fire.

"You do not seem to be in a condition to solve enigmas," I said.

"Because I have had a little wine, you mean? Oh, that is nothing at all; on the contrary, but for that I should never have found my way here, notwithstanding I took the precaution this morning to get your address from Paula's porter. Was not that a happy idea? But one must always be ready in matters of that kind when one wishes to be intimate with men of high rank; and he takes an interest in you, too--a most astonishing interest."

I had by this time enough of his tipsy talk, and said: "I do not know, Arthur, if you are in a condition to understand me. If you are, let me tell you once for all, that I am fortunately in a position not to care a single farthing whether Prince Prora takes an interest in me or not; and you yourself, as far as I can see, would be doing yourself a service by mixing yourself as little as possible in the prince's concerns, in this direction at least."

"Thank you," said Arthur, "but that I foresaw. You are a lucky fellow; you need no one, and are sufficient for yourself. Always sober, always prudent, always clear-headed, and always in funds; while a fellow like me is forever in some devilish embroilment. But so it always has been and always will be. I have often wished I had been the son of a carter, had been beaten and knocked about, and forced to work for my bread, instead of this glittering misery, in which I starve one day and live in luxury the next. It is a misery, old fellow, a misery; but the best thing is that one can blow his brains out whenever he chooses."

I knew this declamation of old. It was the same, with but a slight alteration of the words, which Arthur used to deliver in our school-days when he had drunk too much of the bad punch at a boyish carouse, and got to talking of his unpaid glove bills and his little dealings with Moses in the Water-street. And it was the same Arthur, too, the same frivolous, selfish, cold-hearted voluptuary, with the soft voice and the insinuating manners; and I--I was just the same good-natured fellow, whom a light word carelessly spoken could move as if it came direct from the heart. And I had loved him in my young days, when I wore a linen blouse and he a velvet jacket; we had played so many merry pranks together, and so often basked in the afternoon sunshine in field and wood, and in the boat at sea; and things like these cannot be forgotten--at least I never could forget them.

"Arthur," I said, "must you then always be in trouble and distress? Could it not be otherwise if you chose? A man like you, with so much talent, so much tact, such engaging manners----"

"And such a father!" cried Arthur, with a laugh that went to my heart. "Do you suppose that one can do anything with such a father, who compromises me every moment--every moment places me in the pillory, or at least keeps me in perpetual fear that he will do it?"

"I would never speak thus of my father, Arthur," I said.

"I suppose not," he answered. "You never had reason to: if I had had such a father as yours I would be a different man. But my father! Here he runs from this man to that, and begs for me a sort of position in our legation at London, and a few weeks later he goes round to the very same men and begs for himself; and the result is that they don't want in the London legation the son of a man whom they have to shut their door upon at home; and if I had not in London made the acquaintance of Prince Prora, who most kindly took an interest in me, I should not know how to pay for my cup of coffee to-morrow morning."

"Arthur," I said, "I believe you need the money more than I do. Suppose you take it back to the prince, for it comes from the prince, as you might as well confess--and say to him from me that I neither need it nor desire it, and request that it may be given to you. As for our little account, that we can settle when you really are in funds."

"You dear old George!" cried Arthur, springing up and seizing my hand. "You are the same dear fellow you always were; I intended it for you, but if you don't need it--" and he hastily clutched up the notes which he had so carefully counted, and thrust them into his breast pocket.

"Cannot the prince open some definite career to you?" I asked.

"The prince!" he replied. "Bah! you remind me of the game the young girls used to play when we were children--Emilie Heckepfennig, Elise Kohl, and whatever their names were--the game of the meal-pile, into which a ring was stuck, and each one of the girls cut away in turn a part of the pile, and then more, and then a little more, until down fell the meal-pile, and the little snub-noses went to rooting in it for the ring. That is the very image of the man: everyday one charming hand or another cuts away a portion of the meal-pile that is called Prince Karl of Prora-Wiek, and before long down the pile will tumble; it leans over now, I can tell you," and Arthur buttoned up his overcoat, and drew on again his right glove, which he had pulled off to count the money.

"I should be sorry to know that, if I were, as you are, a friend of the young man."

"Friend?" said he, lighting a cigar at the lamp. "Friend? pah! I am as little his friend as he is mine. He needs me, because--well, he needs me, and I need him; and whoever first ceases to need the other will give him a friendly kick; only I imagine I shall need him longer than he me, or than his lungs will hold out, which I suspect are more than half gone already."

Arthur had put on his hat, and as he stood before me, and the light fell upon his handsome, pale, smiling face, I felt a sharp pang of sorrow for him, which he probably perceived in my looks, for he began to laugh heartily, and said:

"What a doleful face you are making, as if I were on my way direct to the gallows, and not to the Albert Theatre to see the fair Bellini who makes her début to-night. And afterwards a supper at Tavolini's with her, if we can manage it. You see my life has its bright sides, for all. Good-by, old raven!"

And he nodded familiarly to me, and lounged out of the door, which he forgot to close behind him.

I closed it, and put fresh coals on the half-extinguished fire, trimmed the light, and sat down at my table, and said as I opened my books: "It is very singular that a young prince should take such an interest in a poor blacksmith. Bah! I should be a fool to let such people move me from my path."

But though I strove to be wise, and to banish from my thoughts the folly of the world, it kept drawing as by some magnetic power my thoughts away from the dry formulas to bright life, of which I had caught, as it were, a glimpse in the opening and closing of the door. Gay enough was the scene; a table covered with half-emptied bottles and the dainties of a dessert, and around the table a half-dozen jovial faces ruddy with the wine, and mine among them, glowing with wine and pleasure brighter than all the rest, since I was so much stronger than they that I could have drunk them all under the table, and I sang a bacchanalian song, and they all clapped and stamped, with cries of Bravo! Encore!

I passed my hand across my brow. What insane dream was this? What had the solitary workman to do with things which had been invented only for rich idlers? Here was the work to which I had devoted myself; it was a jealous mistress, and I could, not divide my affection between it and the fair Bellini.

I sprang up, and I believe I struck my forehead with my clenched fist without producing any perceptible result. There she stood in my imagination just as she looked when, going out of the door, she turned round to take another look at the picture--the woman who so resembled Constance--the actress who made her first appearance to-night. And in a box close to the stage would be sitting the young prince with his boon-companions, staring through their opera-glasses at the fair Bellini, while I sat here by the comfortless light of a lamp, in a chilly room, with burning head and freezing hands, putting down upon paper long rows of figures which would lead to no result.

I do not know by what steps the evil thought that had arisen in my soul suddenly mastered my will; I only know that a few minutes later I was hastening through the dark snow-covered streets, and soon arrived, breathless, at the ticket-office of the Albert Theatre. Every place was taken the box-keeper assured me, but in the lowest proscenium-box on the right there was a standing-place.

"Give me that, then."

The man looked at me with surprise; he had mentioned the fact as a mere piece of information without the slightest intention of offering it to me, whose place was evidently in the pit or gallery. He looked doubtfully at me; but he had shown me the ticket and could not now deny it, so he put the best face on it he could, and let the plebeian pass to the aristocratic box.

The box was entirely full with the exception of the place I had taken, which was in the furthest corner, on the side that looked toward the stage, so that I could see but a small portion of the latter, but could look into the depth of one of the wings, and had a view of the opposite proscenium-box, and of so much of the audience as occupied the extreme places in the various tiers.

When I took possession of this enviable place a couple of elegantly-curled heads looked around to see the disturber, and then exchanged remarks of a nature apparently not flattering to me; but as I had not the look of one who could be unceremoniously shown the door they left me unmolested, and I was allowed to give myself up to that delight which a feeling heart can find in the contemplation of an empty proscenium-box, and a side-scene in which a dozen painted ladies and gentlemen in Spanish costume were apparently only waiting the prompter's signal to step upon the stage. The signal was given. The Spanish ladies and gentlemen marched in couples out of the wing, and I observed one or two in the extreme foreground taking their places upon chairs. Then I heard a tumult upon the stage, as if from a throng crowding in, and the chorus broke forth--

"Hail, Preciosa, maiden most fair; Twine ye fresh flowers to garland her hair!"

During this chorus castanets clicked and tambourines resounded: there was applause upon the stage, all crying "Hail to Preciosa!" and as if the cry had found an echo, the whole house, from pit to gallery, burst into a shout of "Brava! Brava!" and I saw the men applauding like mad, and the ladies straining forward to see better, and it seemed as if their rapture would have no end. At last they were quieted a little, and one of the Spanish gentlemen upon the chairs in the foreground, who was called--I think, Don Fernando--said to another: "By heaven, a lovely girl!" and the other--Don Francisco--answered: "An enchanting little beauty, indeed!" and at this the shouts and the bravas and the applause burst forth again, as if the house were coming down, so that the old gypsy mother could scarcely make herself heard when she asked if it was the gentlemen's pleasure to hear a song from her grand-daughter Preciosa.

Don Fernando asked for "something describing the happiness of a child in the arms of its loving parents." The voice of Don Alonzo, whom I could not see--a voice vibrating as if with passion--pronounced it "a cruel thoughtlessness to ask an orphan to sing of joys which heaven had denied her." Don Fernando expressed his regret that he had hit upon so ill-chosen a theme; but Don Francisco interrupted him with the words: "Hush, she is about to sing; she begins--" Then a momentary pause, and then----

I had followed all these preliminaries with an intense expectation which could have been shared by none in the house. I knew nothing of the piece, had never even heard of it, that I know, but a sort of instinct revealed to me everything that, invisible to me, was going on upon the stage; and I knew that the moment had now come in which she who took the part of Preciosa would speak for the first time. But a few seconds elapsed between the last words of the old Don Francisco and the first words of Preciosa, and yet they seemed to me an age. A wondrous intuition seized me that it was certainly she, and my heart beat wildly at the thought, when the first sound of her voice reached my ear, and my head sank against the side of the box as I involuntarily gasped, "It is she!"

The ear has a faithful memory, more faithful perhaps than that of any other sense; and the ear it was that had drawn me into my passion for Constance von Zehren when in the evening I stood at the open window and listened to catch the sound of her voice when I might no longer see her, though it were but a word to her old servant. And sometimes I caught the notes of those songs which her deep, rich voice poured forth with such matchless melody. Yes; it was herself, Constance von Zehren, the daughter of the proudest of the proud, the kinswoman of Paula, an actress here upon the stage of a suburb-theatre!

How strangely the times had changed! A sadness seized me, and I could have wept; I wished to be away, for it seemed to me a crime against the memory of my unhappy friend that I should listen here to what would have been so horrible to him; but I could not go; I stood as if spellbound, my head leaned against the partition, without motion and almost without breathing; I stood thus during Preciosa's improvisation, and scarcely moved when the curtain fell and the storm of applause broke forth more furious than ever.

There was a movement in my box. A young lady, who found the high temperature of the box more than her nerves could endure, had fainted, or was about to faint, and was conducted out by two elder ladies, followed by several young gentlemen of the party. In this way some half-dozen seats were left vacant, which were at once taken by those who remained. And thus it happened that when the curtain again rose, besides the left wing I could now also see a part of the gypsy camp under the Spanish cork-trees, and one or two members of the respectable gypsy family, who were reclining about the great kettle under which a fire was flickering. The captain and Viarda have determined to go to Valencia. They are only waiting for Preciosa, who is wandering alone in the woods. The gypsies scatter in various directions; for a moment the stage is empty, and then I saw her as I had seen her before.

As I had seen her on that autumn morning under the beeches of Zehrendorf, through whose lightly-waving branches the golden sunlight fell upon her; a slender, deep brunette, in a strangely fantastic dress of green velvet with golden braidings, her beloved guitar by her side. Just as she was then--as if the years that had flown had left no trace upon her, nor been able to steal one of the dark roses from her cheeks, or quench the lustre of her radiant eyes. And just as then my heart palpitated, and I could scarcely breathe as she began to descend the rocks under the lofty trees as she before came down the mossy bank to the tarn where I was standing, and sitting upon a mossy bank at the foot of the rocks, and raising her voice--that soft rich voice of which my heart remembered every tone--she sang:

"Lone I am, but am not lonely; When the moonbeams round me glide, One loved presence hovers near me, One dear form is at my side."

Just so I had heard her voice in those balmy moonlight nights, floating to me from the glimmering park, and the memory of those happy days completely overcame me. My throat seemed compressed, my heart beat violently, hot tears burst from my eyes and hid her and everything from my sight.

The thunder of applause with which the public greeted the close of the romanza recalled me to myself. I saw that she bowed, and prepared to obey their repeated calls; I saw the leader raise his baton, and heard the first notes of the charming melody,

"Lone I am, but am not lonely----"

when suddenly a tumult occurred in the theatre. All eyes were turned upon the lower proscenium-box on the left, directly opposite to me, into which at this moment a party of young gentlemen, elegantly dressed, and with heated faces, as if they had just been dining, entered noisily, and seated themselves upon the two front rows of chairs. In the left-hand corner a young man took his place, who seemed, by the attentions the rest paid him, to be the most distinguished among them. His right hand, in a yellow glove, hung indolently over the front of the box, and his face was turned to one of his companions. The threatening hisses of the audience did not disturb him as he conversed half aloud, and he only turned his head when the singer suddenly paused. At this moment I recognized Prince Prora, and plainly saw him change color as he caught sight of Preciosa. She had recognized him at the first glance, and the blood forsook her cheeks and her voice failed her. Suddenly she arose from her seat, as if intending to hasten off the stage; then stopped, as if about to faint, and pressed her hand upon her heart. The audience imagined that their favorite--for this the beautiful girl had at once become--was so deeply hurt by the rude behavior of these aristocratic young gentlemen that she could not sing, and they began to hiss more loudly--to cry "Silence!" and even "Turn out the aristocrats! turn out the yellow gloves!"

The young prince looked around with the expression of one whom the matter did not concern in the least, but his companions felt called upon to do more: they laughed loudly, bowed with ironical politeness, and openly scorned the audience, who now seemed disposed to carry their threats into execution. Several Hotspurs were clambering over the backs of the seats towards the box, when suddenly the singer, who had been standing with her eyes riveted upon it, gave a cry, dropped her guitar, and would have fallen had not Don Fernando, in whom I recognized her companion at the exhibition, rushed out of the wing and caught her in his arms. At the same moment the curtain fell. I hastened out of the box, not knowing what I was doing nor where I was going, and only recovered myself when the icy-cold air of the winter night blew in my burning face.

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Chapter VI

I do not know how many hours I passed in wandering thus through the streets: I have only a dim remembrance of great blocks of houses rising dark into the gray of the night; of flakes of snow fluttering down from this gray into the yellow light; of vehicles rolling past me almost without sound, over the fresh-fallen snow; and figures that glided by me with heads down, sheltering themselves as they best could from the snow-storm.

There were not many of these latter, for every one sought a shelter from the bad weather. Those who were out in it were those who had no choice, such as the unhappy creatures who with pale lips murmured to the passers-by words intended to sound warm and inviting.

One of these unfortunates I thought I saw before me, as wandering through a wide street in the most distinguished quarter I reached one of the small palaces, before the door of which just then drove up at a sharp trot a carriage drawn by two fiery horses, and throwing around a bright light from both its lamps. In the light of these lamps stood the girl, crouching close to the wall, and I saw that at the moment when the equerry sprang from the box and helped his master out of the carriage she advanced a step and extended her arm from her cloak, as if she wished to stop the latter as he descended. But he had pulled the fur collar of his cloak up around his face, and as he rapidly hurried up the steps did not see the girl. The door, which had given a sight of a brilliantly-lighted hall, closed behind master and servant; the coachman touched his spirited animals lightly with the whip, the carriage rolled away and vanished into the open gate of an adjoining building.

No one remained without but myself, the poor girl, and the snow-flakes still fluttering down from the darkness into the yellow light of the lamps. The girl came towards me and passed me by. It was plain that she did not see me, but I saw her as the light of one of the lamps struck upon a face distorted by mental anguish.

"Constance!" I exclaimed.

She suddenly stopped and stared at me with her glowing black eyes.

"Constance!" I repeated, "do you not know me? It is I--George----"

"My dragon-slayer, who was to kill all the dragons in my path! Why have you not killed that one--that one!" and she laughed a frightful laugh, and pointed to the door which had closed on Prince Prora.

Her cloak was loose and fluttering in the icy wind, and I saw she was still in the costume of Preciosa. She must have rushed off the stage into the street. The snow-flakes were driving into her fevered face.

"Poor Constance!" I murmured, and wrapped the cloak closer around her shoulders, drew her arm in mine, anxious first of all to lead her from this place. She willingly followed me, and we walked thus through the long, wind-swept streets, I looking down from time to time at the poor girl, who clung even closer to me, and asking her in a compassionate tone how she was, and whither I should take her.

I had several times repeated these questions without receiving an answer, when she suddenly stopped, and murmured with pale lips--"I can go no further!" It seemed to me that she was on the point of fainting. I was in the greatest embarrassment. There was not a public conveyance to be seen anywhere in the street, and in our objectless flight we had wandered far from the fashionable quarter where, upon my repeated inquiries, she informed me that she lodged. But it so happened, I know not how, that we had strayed into the neighborhood of my own lodging, and I thought it the best, indeed the only thing I could do, to take her there. "You can at least remain there long enough to warm yourself, while I get a carriage to take you home." Without answering a word she followed me. I had the key of the outer door, so that I did not need to disturb the old watchman; and his dog, that came growling up to us, as soon as he recognized me, leaped about me, wagging his tail.

I congratulated myself that I had hit upon this expedient, for Constance hung heavily upon my arm, and I had almost to carry her across the yard and up the steps to my room. And when we had reached the room, and by the dim light of the fire I had led her to the arm-chair, and lighted my lamp, I saw that her eyes were vacant of expression and half-closed, while a deep pallor overspread her whole face.

My confusion in a situation so new for me was less than I should have supposed. I had no other thought than as promptly as possible to assist one who was in such urgent need of assistance. I stirred the fire until it blazed brightly; I took off her cloak, now saturated with the melted snow, and wrapped her in a plaid; I folded a coverlid around her feet, and warmed her cold hands in my own. Then it occurred to me that probably a cup of tea, which I could prepare in a moment, would be of service; so I got out the tea-things from my cupboard, boiled the water in a tin kettle over my fire, and poured her out a cup of the refreshing beverage, not forgetting first to add a little good cognac. She drank it eagerly; I offered her a second cup, which she also drank.

The warm drink seemed to have greatly revived her: she looked at the pictures on the walls, at the furniture, and last at me, and said, reaching out to me her small hand, in which the warm life began to pulsate again, "How good you are! how good! You are the best creature I have ever known. How much happier might my life have been had you come to our house a few months earlier: you good, good George!"

It was again the Constance of those old times: the same fascinating prattle in the same soft melodious voice: and I, who knew so well what confidence to place in all this kindness and gentleness, stood like the great oaf that I was, my whole soul thrilled by the sweet, unforgotten tones, and trembling from head to foot at the touch of her soft hand. But my reason made an effort to obtain the supremacy once for all. I drew my hand from hers, stepped back to the fireplace, and said, while with great apparent calmness I was warming my hands behind my back:

"You are very kind; but your kindness must not make me forget that I have undertaken to see you safely home. If you are so disposed, and feel sufficiently recovered, I will now go for a carriage."

"You are still angry with me," she said, leaning back in the chair and looking up to me under her long lashes. "Why are you angry? What have I done to you? What have I done that another in my place would not have done? For my love I gave reputation, home, myself: was I to bear so tender a solicitude for the feelings of a youth, who scarcely knew himself what those feelings were? Did you love me? Did you ever love me?" she repeated, springing up and looking into my eyes. "You never loved me. You could not else stand so calmly there, and you are not worth the regret it cost me to play off that little deception on you. Do you know that I was so childish as never entirely to get over it? That your friendly face with its honest eyes looked continually in upon my dreams, and drew from me tears of remorse? You, of all men, have least right to be angry with me."

And she threw herself back in the chair, and defiantly folded her arms over her breast.

"Who said that I was angry with you?" I replied.

"You must be angry," she returned with a sort of violence. "I will have you angry: should I wish you to despise me? There is no third case possible. The third would be indifference; and I am not indifferent to you, am I, George? Not indifferent, though you are now making an amazing effort to appear so. When two persons have once stood as near to each other as we two, and are connected by such recollections as ours, they can never entirely lose each other in the desert of indifference. Do you know that some weeks ago, when I saw a likeness of you in the exhibition, I was startled as if I had seen a ghost, and could not bring myself away from it, and afterwards I returned to it again and again, and wept many tears at the thought of you? Then I saw by the catalogue that it was painted by my cousin, and I made a pair of you both, a happy pair, and blessed you in my inmost heart. Now indeed I see that it is otherwise. What are you? What are you doing! How did you come to this strange place?" and she looked again around the room.

"I am a simple workman," I answered; "a blacksmith in a neighboring machine-shop."

"Blacksmith!--machine-shop!--what do you say? Who would have said this that afternoon when I saw you setting out for the hunt with the others, in high hunting-boots and a short velvet coat, with your gun and game-pouch, so tall and stately, the tallest and stateliest of all! What would my father have said? You always sided with him--perhaps you do so still; but believe me, he did not deal well with me; and if I am to blame, and am an outcast and accursed, it all, all falls upon his head. Do you know that the old Prince Prora, when my father grew indignant at his refusal, flung in his face the taunt: 'My son cannot marry your bastard, nor can I fight with a smuggler!' My father sprang at him and would have strangled him--as if that could restore his honor or mine! And you see, George, of all this I knew nothing: I first learned it from Kar--from him when he proposed to abandon me in a foreign country. Can a man know what it is to a girl, when she has loved a man, be he worthy or unworthy--given herself to him wholly, staked her all upon him, like a desperate gamester upon a single card--to be thrust out by him into wretchedness, with mockery and shame? Not into common wretchedness, such as seeks a subsistence by the light of a poor working-lamp, or in the glare of the street-lanterns--I was always surrounded by splendor and luxury, and the Marchese of Serra di Falco was as much richer than he as sunny Sicily is fairer than our foggy native island. And yet it was wretchedness--boundless, glittering wretchedness--which no woman escapes who is deceived in her love, whatever the compensation that may be offered her. I tried hate; but hate is the twin brother of love, and they can not deny their common parentage. There is but one remedy for love, and that is revenge. Avenge me on him! You can do it; you are so strong; you have already once had him in your power--that night when you met him in the woods. He told me about it and asked who the giant was. Why did you let him escape? Why did you not strangle him--brain him?--and then come to me and say, 'I am your lover, for I am stronger than the other,' and take me in your arms and carry me off? But you men never show us that you are men, and you wonder then that we play with you! As if we could do anything else with a creature that we do not see to be stronger than ourselves, and often so much weaker! Show what you can be--what you are! Crush the head of this serpent, and I will fall at your feet and worship you!"

While thus speaking she had let fall the plaid in which I had wrapped her and had risen from the chair, and with her last words she sank upon her knees, holding out her arms to me. The flickering light of the fire played upon her fantastic gypsy dress, gleamed upon her dark hair which hung in dishevelled locks over her cheeks and shoulders, and glowed upon the face which had so fatal a beauty for me. The nameless charm with which she had at first fascinated me overcame me with all the old might: my heart beat as if it would burst from my bosom, and feverish shudders ran over my whole body, but with a vehement effort I collected myself, stretched out my ice-cold hand and raised her, and said:

"You apply to the wrong person. Entrust your vengeance upon the prince to one who has a nearer interest in it: to the young man, for instance, upon whose arm you were leaning when I saw you in the gallery, and who, this very evening, if I am not mistaken, was the personage in the play whom Preciosa made happy with her favor."

Constance had risen slowly, her eyes ever fixed upon mine, and began to pace the room with hasty steps, pausing at intervals before me, and speaking as she walked:

"How base you men are; how horribly base and unfeeling! Was it for this reason--to heap these cruel reproaches upon me--that you enticed me here? Is this your hospitality? Do you think your fire has warmed me too much, that you now drench me with ice-water? But your heart is so cold only because your brain is so dull; because, for instance, you cannot comprehend how a woman who, from childhood up, has been lapped in visions of future splendor, and has seen her life's dream almost realized, when this dream at once scatters like light mist, and she, with her high-wrought feelings and pampered taste, with her cherished pretensions to beauty and luxury, is about to be given over to a coarse, commonplace existence--that such a woman of necessity must catch at the wretched reflection of the brilliant reality that is irrecoverably gone; that the beloved of princes can afterwards be nothing else than a stage princess. And not even this pitiful reflection does he leave me undisturbed! Again he forces himself upon me, and embitters my poor triumph. But why do I speak of all this to a man who understands it not, and can never understand it--who has chosen the happy lot of a modest existence full of labor, and toil, and quiet sleep?"

I had thrown myself into the chair from which she had arisen, and she stood before me, and went on in a strange, soft, trembling voice:

"If I could only sleep! If I could only sleep! Could I but drink from the fountain that daily flows for you, and will flow for that happy woman whom some day you will bring to this peaceful hearth! Could I banish the fever that here burns me, and here allows me no rest"--she pointed with these words to her breast and her head--"no rest--none! Oh to sleep thus, amid the perfumes of rosemary and violets--a sweet sleep upon a strong, true heart!"

And as I sat with bowed head, and heart filled with pain, I felt a pair of soft arms wind about my neck, a swelling bosom pressed to mine, and a pair of glowing lips that sought my own. Had the dream which the enamored, passionate boy had dreamed become reality, or was I really dreaming? And was it only as one who strives to arouse himself from a dream that I pressed her to me, then sprang to my feet and let her glide from my arms, and again caught her to my heart?

The light which had been burning dimly now sank into the socket and expired, but in the flickering glimmer of the fire I saw the outlines of the lovely form that clung and pressed down to my breast, and as if in a dream I heard a voice murmur at my ear: "to sleep sweetly upon a strong, true heart!"

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Chapter VII

"Are you sick, my dear George?" said Doctor Snellius, entering my room one evening.

I had not seen the doctor since we last parted so unpleasantly, and the visit of the man with the keen spectacles and the keen eyes behind them was doubly disagreeable to one who wished to avoid the gaze of every one. He must have noticed my embarrassment, for the tone of his voice was unusually soft and gentle when he spoke again, after taking his place by the fire.

"I knew it from Klaus Pinnow, who perceived that something was amiss with you, and from Paula, who has perceived nothing because you have not been near her, and who sends me to you for this reason. What is it, my friend? Your hand is hot, you look wretchedly, and you have decided fever. What is amiss?"

"I feel quite well," I answered--drawing my large hand out of the doctor's, which was small and delicate as a woman's, and with it screening my brow and eyes from the sharp spectacles--"perfectly well."

"You must then have some mental trouble, some great distress, which affects natures like yours more powerfully than severe sickness does others. Is it so?"

"You may be right there," I answered.

"And can you not tell me what it is?" asked the doctor, drawing nearer to me, and laying his small hand upon my other hand which rested on my knee.

"It is not worth talking about," I answered. "A curious story--something like one which I have read somewhere or other--about a young man who loved a beautiful woman who was a witch, and one night as he stretched out his hand to take hers she had vanished--out of the chimney--to the Blocksberg--to the devil, I suppose!"

And I sprang up, paced the room for a few minutes in great agitation, and then threw myself again into my chair.

"The story is rather too mystical to build a diagnosis upon," the doctor remarked, in a kind voice, drawing still nearer, and, as he could not take my hand, laying his own familiarly upon my knee.

"Then listen to this: A youth of nineteen loved a beautiful girl of about the same age--loved her passionately, as one loves at those years, especially, when solitude and romantic associations heighten the charm. He was deceived by the girl, and finally shamefully betrayed; and yet he never could forget her, and in the eight or nine years that follows his heart palpitated in his breast whenever he thought of her. And then an accident brought her to him again--just as he had expected to find her--a lost girl, who had been the mistress of I know not how many men. He cannot doubt it--indeed she tells him so herself--and yet while she tells him his heart throbs violently, and in his soul he longs to join the long train of his predecessors. And when she opens her arms he hastened to sink upon her breast in which there beats no heart. He plainly feels that no heart beats there; but a childish, an insane pity seizes him: he will warm this chilled heart again with the glow of his burning kisses, with his own heart's blood. And the phantom drinks his heart's blood--one, two, three nights; and when he wakes in the third, she has vanished as witches vanish, and the next night he sees her at the theatre coquetting with a young dandy, who drives home with her, while outside----"

"Stands the poor man, and beats his head with his fist, and tears out his hair by handfuls; we know all about that!" said Doctor Snellius, and softly patted my knee. "We know all about that," he repeated, touching me still more softly; "it is painful; but when a jaw-tooth with three long roots is pulled out, that is painful too, and so is the setting a broken arm. And I think the poor man whom I have just left is not in a frame of mind to be envied. It is a poor workman in your establishment; you doubtless know him; his name is Jacob Kraft, and he works, if I am not mistaken, in your shop. Well, his wife, a dear good woman, whom the young fellow had courted for many a long day, nine days ago bore a dead child, and now she lies dead herself, and by her bedside kneels poor Jacob and wishes that he had never been born. I do not think the poor fellow's feelings are to be envied. And young Frau Müller is not particularly happy either. Her husband left home this morning, well and cheerful, to go to his work on the new tramway, had his breast crushed in between two wagons, and will die to-night. Besides, my friend, we must all die, and 'after nine it will all be over,' as the manager of the theatre said when the pit hissed."

"Dying is not so much," I said; "I have more than once in my life wished to die, and thought it rather a greater thing that I did not, but kept on living this cursed life."

"And you did right, my friend," said the doctor.

"I am not sure," I replied, "if those Romans of whom I heard at school did not act both nobler and wiselier when they fell upon their swords so soon as the game was lost."

"Every one to his taste," said the doctor. "When a horse breaks his leg we shoot him; but with a man, we set it again; or, if it cannot be saved, cut it off and buckle on a leg of wood or cork, with which he hobbles on the remainder of his earthly pilgrimage. You have no idea, my friend, how little is really necessary to life: hardly more than head and heart. Yes, scarcely even that. You have, no doubt, yourself observed how many a man goes through life without a head; and that one can live with half a heart, or a quarter, I can testify from personal experience."

The doctor said this in a low, dejected tone of voice, as if talking to himself And he went on still, as if talking to himself, softly stroking my knee, and looking into the fire.

"Yes! with half a heart. It is not very easy or very pleasant living; one sometimes feels as if the breast would be crushed, or as if we must lie down just where we happen to be, and never rise up again. But we do get up again, and do some good, if not to ourselves to another whose shoe pinches him somewhere, and whom with our experience and our cobbler's skill we may possibly help. For, my friend, there are very few who are able to pull off their shoes, which in truth is not merely the best but the only way to be rid of all pain. So these people must be helped; and my life for many years has been but a pondering and study how this may be done on a large scale; for in a smaller sphere, as far as very limited private means can reach, I very well know what is to be done, and do all I can. Au revoir, my dear George: I still have a pair of old shoes to patch and a corn or two to trim."

Doctor Snellius gave me a friendly slap on the knee, clapped his worn hat on his bald head, turned in the door to give me an amicable nod, and left me alone.

A man not naturally ignoble is perhaps never more disposed or better fitted to sympathize in other's misfortunes than when he himself has a heavy sorrow. Thus the horrible treachery which Constance had practiced upon me opened my eyes and my heart to the doctor's trouble. That the singular man loved Paula I had never doubted; but as he always draped his love in a humorous cloak, I, in my simplicity, had never seen how strong and deep this love was. It seemed to me so evident that this dwarfish figure, with the misshapen bald head and the grotesquely ugly face, could never be loved by a beautiful slender maiden, as one looks upon it as a matter of course that a man who goes on crutches cannot dance upon the tight-rope. Now for the first time I saw what this man must have suffered through all these years--the man who, not without reason, and assuredly not without a reference to himself, said that a man to live scarcely required more than a head and a heart. And then I compared him, the stoical sufferer, with myself, and asked myself if he, the pure, the good, the noble, did not better deserve Paula's love than I, for this good fortune had always seemed to me a kind of miracle, of which I had ever felt myself unworthy, but never so unworthy as now.

Perhaps more than one youth of eighteen, who may read these lines, will smile compassionately, in the consciousness of his maturer experience, at the man of twenty-eight, who took such a trifle so deeply to heart. But he should consider that I had grown up among the simplest associations, had been eight years in prison, and now since I had lived in the city had employed all my time in carrying out my determination to be a good machinist. How could I have accumulated the experience of my wise censor? How could I know that love-troubles of this kind are to a man of the world what scars are to a brigand--not only honorable in his own eyes and those of his companions, but also in the eyes of the fair whose grace and favor he counts upon winning? I was but a great boy with all my twenty-eight years; I confess it with contrition, and beg my wise friend of eighteen to have patience with me.

Perhaps he will find this a difficult task, when he learns that I carried my folly so far as to feel convinced that I had given myself to the fair sinner, body and soul, forever, and that it was my duty henceforth to live for her; to save her if I could, to perish with her if I must; and that I felt myself nowise released from this obligation and free once more, when she wrote me a delicate little perfumed billet, saying that I was still as ever her good George, whom she loved dearly, but that she could not live with me, and had no wish to be saved by me, far less to perish with me.

But in my own eyes I was and remained a condemned criminal, severed from the companionship of the good and pure. Never for me should the flame glow on the domestic hearth, never a pure woman make me happy with her hand, never laughing children play around my knees. The curse with which unkind Nature had smitten the good doctor--the curse of never being loved as his heart yearned to be--I had in my folly invoked upon myself; and thus nothing remained for me but, like him, to renounce individual love, and, like him, to draw comfort and solace from the overflowing fountain of love for suffering humanity.

I was able to see, later, that the doctor, as wise as he was skilful, judged pretty accurately of my condition, and took a far less tragical view of it than I did. But the state of my thoughts and feelings at the moment fitted very well with his purposes. For years he had looked upon me as his pupil, and he might do so in more than one light. He had a great scheme in view in which he counted on his pupil's assistance, and this, in his opinion, was one step necessary to success.

I had always known that the worthy man, although he constantly maintained that while it was true that stupidity was a misfortune, it was none the less true that misfortune was in most cases mere stupidity--cherished a great love for the unfortunate stupids and the stupid unfortunates. How great this love was, I was now to know. He made me theoretically and practically acquainted with those social questions with which the whole world is now occupied, but then were only seen in their full importance by a few enlightened minds. He showed me the state of things in England, in France, and at home, and what might also be done in Germany upon the pattern of what had been done in England and France. Then he spoke of benefit-societies, of co-operative associations, and workmen's unions, of play-schools for children and trade-schools for adults, and all the means that have been devised to fight the universal enemy upon his own ground. At this time there had been next to nothing of this sort done among us: which was all the more unfortunate, as just at this time, with the springing up of the first railroads, manufactures received a quite unlooked-for expansion, the increased demand for labor brought an enormous influx of workmen, and with this an enormous increase of those evils which even under the old patriarchal relations it had not been possible entirely to prevent.

In my frame of mind at the time I was soon brought to enter into his views with passionate ardor. An ordinary workman, as I was, in brotherly intercourse with my fellow-workmen, I heard and saw everything that went on among them. Where my knowledge was at fault, Klaus, from his fuller experience, could supply the defect, and further than either reached the keen vision of the doctor, who saw into the darkest recesses which poverty and misery hide from the eyes of all but the physician. So we three interchanged experiences, and many an evening, after the heavy work of the day, sat around the doctor's table in consultation over the projects which the doctor had so long been nursing.

Alas! it was little, very little that we could do. On the one side, we had to contend with the stupidity of those who would rather go to ruin than abandon their old routine; and on the other side, with the dull selfishness of those who could not see why they might not prosper, even if the others were ruined.

"It is the old story of Hammer and Anvil," I said one evening to my two friends. "The workmen have so accustomed themselves to the dull passive part of the anvil that they can set nothing in motion, even when their own interest manifestly requires it. The manufacturers, on the other hand, think that as they are now the gentlemen of the hammer, they have only to pound away upon the anvil which, heaven be thanked, has remained patient so far."

"Have I not always told you that it has been so as long as the world has stood?" replied the doctor. "Now you see it for yourself."

"But there must be some remedy discoverable!" I cried. "I cannot let go the precious faith of our beloved friend."

"Not in the way in which he sought it," returned the doctor, shaking his big head. "He imagined that he could make men free by teaching them the dignity and sanctity of labor. 'They were not willing to work when they should have been; now they must whether they will or not; and my task is to bring them to will that which they must. They were not free when they were at liberty; I would make them truly free while they are in captivity, that from bondage they may come forth as free men'--such speeches as these, how often have we heard from his lips? And he firmly believed it all, noble enthusiast that he was, because he did not know the world, did not know that labor is a commodity in the market of the world, which, like every other, is subject to the great laws of supply and demand; and that these may stand so adjusted that the free diligent workman may find himself in a pass where neither his freedom, his diligence, nor his work is worth a farthing. So the cause of Anvil versus Hammer is appealed to a higher court, where it will be decided according to the great laws of history and political economy, with a verdict--as our friend had correctly discovered--, that both parties were guilty and liable for the costs of the suit."

"That may quiet our anxiety as to the final result," I said; "but if I rightly understood our friend, the better man might in himself compose this difference, as he is conscious that at every moment he at once acts and suffers, gives and receives, bears and is borne--in a word, is both Hammer and Anvil."

"Very fine and honorable for him who so penetrates himself with this truth that it influences all his actions," replied the doctor. "But the common good is less dependent upon this than it seems; and lucky that it is so, for so soon as the individual has power, for instance riches, he is seized with a damnable itching to abuse it. What then is to become of poor humanity?"

"And yet you abused me that I did not clutch with both hands at your offer to intrust all your fortune to me, which I should have cheated you out of forthwith, as a good start on my way to a million."

"That is a very different matter," said the doctor, in some confusion.

"I do not see why," I answered. "What security have you that I can resist temptation better than another? Or do I, with my broad shoulders, look as if I would go through the needle's eye easier than our worthy commerzienrath?"

"Do not compare yourself with that monster," cried the doctor in a rage. "Did I never show you the letter in which he answered my request that he would take an interest in our projects? Here, you can skip that part--a coarse joke about people who count their chickens before they are hatched---but here: 'Co-operative associations? Stuff and nonsense! There is a shop at every corner. Beneficial societies for the sick?--burial societies? I want healthy workmen, and have always had as many as I wanted, and more too. The sick are your affair, not mine, respected Herr Doctor; and as for dying, it is not likely that either of us can hinder that?'"

"He is a fool!" cried the doctor, tearing the letter in fragments and stamping upon it; "a fellow with no bowels; no better than a caterpillar in human form!"

"But so is every one who has a million, doctor."

"Oh, you always have an apology for him," crowed Doctor Snellius.

In this he was not altogether wrong: I could never feel as indignant with the man as I should have felt with another. For, after all, the man in the blue frock-coat with gold buttons, and the yellow nankeen trousers, was a figure that belonged to the days of my childhood, upon whom, be he what he might, there ever lay a light from the sun that had shone upon those days. And what this is, is known to every one who has had a childhood; which, unhappily, is more than many can say of themselves. Let this sun but once shine upon any one, nay, upon any lifeless thing, and they are invested with a charter that at all times we willingly respect. And then there was another reason or two for my looking upon the rich commerzienrath in another light than did my good but bitter friend. To be sure, when I thought of it, I could not comprehend--nor have I comprehended to this day--how this man could be the father of the lovely, blue-eyed Hermine; but so he was, like an uncouth, rough, prickly, and not over-clean shell, in which lay this precious pearl, and which had to be grasped if one wished to enjoy the sight of the pearl's beauty. This was easier for me, as I had always seen shell and pearl together; that is, I had always seen the best side of the shell, the smoothest and most agreeable side, which it turned towards the daughter pearl within. Another reason was, the old cynic seemed to me a kind of original in his way, and I had always had a liking for that class of men.

I had not seen him since our meeting on board the steamer, although he had been once or twice in the city and had visited the works. The winter he had spent, according to his custom, in Uselin, but with the opening of spring had taken up his residence at Zehrendorf, where his various new arrangements urgently required his presence. Hermine was with him, who for years had spent her summers in the country, having an intense delight in country life and pleasures. As a matter of course, Fräulein Amalie Duff accompanied her young lady.

All this I learned from Paula, who indeed was the only person who kept me informed of what went on in the Streber family, as she kept up a pretty active correspondence with Hermine. Whether or not I was honored with a passing mention in their letters I could never rightly learn. Sometimes I thought so, and again I thought not; and I did not like to ask Paula directly. I had wished indeed to ask her not to mention to Hermine that I was employed in her father's establishment, but I had never done so, because it seemed to me like a bit of childish vanity to request that I should not be spoken of to a girl who, very possibly, never asked about me. But I almost believed that Paula had divined and complied with my unspoken wish, and that they knew nothing of me. Even if I were entirely indifferent to Hermine, I was well assured that I occupied no small place in the kind heart of her duenna, and that she certainly would never cease seeking faithfully for her "Richard" until she found him. But over all these things there hung a mist, which was only to be lifted for me later, perhaps too late. Once or twice, it is true, I was struck by the warmth with which Paula, especially lately, spoke of Hermine. "She is a charming creature," she once said, "with the happiest advantages; and she will develop into a noble woman if she finds the right kind of a husband." And again: "Happy the man who wins this treasure! But he must be a man worthy the name, for I fancy the keeping will be a harder task than the winning."

Did Paula know that after that memorable meeting on the steamer, as the wanderer plodded his lonely way towards the great city, the blue eyes of Hermine were his lodestars? When she thus praised the fair girl to me--and she knew what weight her praises bore--did she wish to show me clearly the folly of certain fancies which might have arisen in my mind? But what ground had I given her for believing me capable of this folly? Just here there was a secret, like a dark cloud, between Paula and myself; and it was not the only one, nor, unfortunately, the darkest. I had dropped no hint--how could I?--of my unhappy meeting with Constance: it was the only wound which her pure hand might not touch; a wound which must secretly bleed until it closed of itself. But such a secret wound, which one carefully hides, pains us thrice as much, and is thrice as long in healing; and the worst is, that with it we have an evil conscience, and shrink from the touch of the hand that is dearest to us, always dreading that at some time, unwares, it will make the cruel discovery.

Thus it was now between Paula and myself. I had never visited her so rarely, never been so cautious in my speech with her--indeed there were times when the unwavering kindness of this lovely and amiable girl was really painful to me. I trembled lest the conversation should turn upon Constance, or lest Paula should learn that Constance and the Bellini were one and the same person. Certainly, if no one else did, the young Prince Prora knew the secret; and so, probably, did Arthur.

But my uneasiness seemed groundless; neither the prince nor Arthur repeated their visit, and I only learned from rumor that the prince, after throwing the whole residence into uproar by his extravagances and caprices, had been sent into the country by his father, and that Arthur had accompanied him. About the same time the newspapers, which then occupied themselves much more with matters of this sort than in our agitated times, reported that the manager of the Theatre Royal had at once engaged the young artist who had excited so much admiration at the Albert Theatre, but that in high circles it was thought unfit that a star, however brilliant, should be transferred from a comparatively humble sphere to the lofty heights of a royal stage without a becoming process of transition, and that on this account they had given Fräulein Bellini leave of absence of several months, to be applied to filling certain deficiencies in her repertoire, and to careful cultivation of her eminent talent, for which purpose she had at once undertaken a journey to Paris. Others added: In the company of the premier amoureux of the Albert Theatre, Herr Lenz, who also had been engaged for the Theatre Royal; or, as others again said, had to be engaged because the Bellini, as self-willed as she was beautiful, made that gentleman's engagement a condition of her own. In this connection the papers gave the interesting information that Herr Lenz's real name was Herr von Sommer, and that he was the son of a high functionary--of the minister, according to some--of a small neighboring state. The origin of the fair Bellini was also surmised to be traceable to high-quarters, but they were not at present able--others phrased it that it was not altogether discreet--to lift the mysterious veil.

When I heard this I drew a long breath, like a man frightened by a ghost, when he hears the clock strike one. The spectre may come again the next night, but for twenty-three hours at least he will be undisturbed. I might be sure of not meeting her for several months; in the evening, when I returned from Paula's house, I could pass through the street in which she lived without seeing her range of windows lighted, or carriages with lighted lamps and footmen in livery standing at the door. Yes, the cold, cruel, ghostly winter night was at an end: once more it was morning, once more it was spring.

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